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LAND-TRANSFER BACKERS | OIL AND GAS AUCTIONS GO ONLINE
| JUSTICE FOR LEONARD PELTIER
High Country News
For people who care about the West
Salmon Power
July 25, 2016 | $5 | Vol. 48 No. 12 | www.hcn.org
A historic legal victory could give Alaska tribes
more control over their fish, wildlife and homelands
By Krista Langlois
CONTENTS
FROM OUR WEBSITE: HCN.ORG
Editor’s note
On sovereignty and
subjugation
KRISTA LANGLOIS
FEATURE
On the cover 12
Isty Hlasny hangs
salmon in the smoke
house at fish camp
on the Kuskokwim
River near Bethel,
Alaska, in June 2014.
BOB HALLINEN/
ALASKA DISPATCH NEWS
Salmon Power A historic legal victory could give Alaska tribes
more control over their fish, wildlife and homelands
By Krista Langlois
CURRENTS
5The path of lease resistance Escalating protests against public-land drilling
usher in online auctions
5The Latest: Road runoff regs
6Snapshot: The good, the bad and the ugly of drones
7Dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t Feds propose measures
to reduce Glen Canyon Dam’s impact on the Grand Canyon — a bit
8Land transfer support The American Lands Council has galvanized
county commissioners to back federal-land transfers
9 BLM moves away from landmark Northwest Forest Plan
Conservationists, counties and timber companies raise alarms
9The Latest: Birth control for wild horses
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3 FROM OUR WEBSITE: HCN.ORG
4 LETTERS
10 THE HCN COMMUNITY Research Fund, Dear Friends 19 MARKETPLACE
23 WRITERS ON THE RANGE
It’s long past time to free a man unjustly imprisoned By Mike Baughman
In this season of fire, nix the campfire By Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff
26 BOOKS
The Land of Open Graves by Jason de León and Crossing the Line
by Linda Valdez. Reviewed by Jon M. Shumaker
27 ESSAY
The Chickadee Symphony By Tom Taylor
28 HEARD AROUND THE WEST By Betsy Marston
2 High Country News July 25, 2016
Accused BLM bomb suspect William Keebler, photographed in February at the funeral for Arizona
rancher LaVoy Finicum in Kanab, Utah, who was killed during the Malheur standoff in Oregon.
PATRICK BENEDICT/GEPHARDT DAILY
On June 22, FBI agents arrested William Keebler, a Utah man, for allegedly
orchestrating an attack on a Bureau of Land Management cabin in on
Mount Trumbull northwest Arizona. The night before, the Patriots Defense
Force militia planted a bomb at the facility with the intention of blowing
it apart. Undercover agents apparently thwarted the attack by providing
a faulty bomb, which failed to explode. Keebler, who leads the group,
allegedly orchestrated the failed attack in response to what he views as
government overreach and the mismanagement of natural resources. Court
documents state that Keebler intended to blow up government vehicles
and buildings, not people, though he also wanted to create a second
bomb that might be “used against law enforcement if they got stopped
while driving.” This recent bombing plot is part of a long history of violent
threats toward federal-lands agency employees that stems from deeprooted disputes over public-lands management.
Keebler spent 13 days at the 2014 Bundy standoff, supporting Nevada
rancher Cliven Bundy against the federal agents who were cracking down
on decades of grazing violations. The felony complaint against Keebler
states that he hoped to create a confrontation similar to the Bundy
standoff. Keebler also knew LaVoy Finicum, the activist who was shot and
killed by Oregon State Police in a confrontation at the end of the armed
occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge earlier this year.
He scouted the location of the bomb attack with Finicum last year; the
Mount Trumbull facility is near Finicum’s grazing allotment. The federal
government has been criticized for failing to respond adequately to previous illegal acts associated with the Sagebrush Rebellion. Keebler’s arrest
and the undercover action that led to it shows that it is now paying close
attention to such threats. TAY WILES MORE: hcne.ws/blm-bomb
Trending
JOBS LOST IN WESTERN COAL MINES
2012- JUNE 2016
511 jobs
lost from
3 mines
MT
Quoted
Western coal jobs decline
Having a compelling
modern vision (for
public lands) is probably
the best antidote to the
militias and legislators
who want to take
over and privatize our
inheritance.
In early June, 80 full-time employees
received layoff notices from the West Elk
Mine in Somerset, one of Colorado’s largest
677 jobs
coal producers. The mine is the last still in
lost from
operation in the North Fork Valley on the
2 mines
state’s Western Slope, where coal mining
1 to close
has been a mainstay of the rural economy
WY
for nearly 120 years. Just five years ago,
813 jobs
approximately 1,200 people were employed
lost from
15 jobs
by three coal mines here. Now, fewer than
5 mines
lost from
250 people are. In April, Arch Coal and
2 closed
1 mine
Peabody Energy announced 465 layoffs at
U T CO
two major Wyoming coal mines, as both filed
for bankruptcy. Historically low natural gas prices
150 jobs
and stricter environmental regulations make it
lost from
harder for coal companies, and many have been hurt
2 mines
by questionable business decisions and high executive
salaries and bonuses. According to HCN data compiled
NM
from local media and energy industry reports, more than 2,600
coal-mining jobs have disappeared since 2012 across the West.
DATA COLLECTED
For out-of-work coal miners, Western states have done little to provide a safety
BY PAIGE BLANKENBUEHLER
net; so far, there are no statewide programs that provide re-training, counseling
or economic development strategies. Some coal companies offer laid-off workers
MORE: Help us gather
a severance package, but former miners have few opportunities to find positions
more data on other
that match their previous salaries — on average, more than $80,000 a year.
coal-mine layoffs:
“
”
—Bill Hedden, from his essay “In praise of a
wild West: A 21st-century vision for Western
public lands, including their role in solving
challenges like climate change”
MORE: hcne.ws/publiclands-vision
hcne.ws/layoff-tip
PAIGE BLANKENBUEHLER MORE: hcne.ws/coal-layoffs
13
TRILLION
Fish camp on the Kuskokwim, where Mike Williams’ family and other Alaska Natives have fished for generations.
In the 1970s, the Pacific
Northwest was at war over
fishing. Tribal fishermen
insisted on their right to
catch more salmon, inspiring
a lawsuit against the state
of Washington that 14 tribes eventually joined. In
1974, a white U.S. district court judge decided in
their favor, granting them rights to half the salmon
catch. George Boldt’s courageous decision, which
angered many white Washingtonians, remains
a landmark in the push for tribal sovereignty. It
was also a validation of Native American civil
disobedience, led by a Nisqually man of similarly
strong character, Billy Frank Jr.
Too few people pass such tests of character.
America is failing one right now. For despite our
patriotic songs on the Fourth of July, this is not the
land of the free, nor the home of the brave. It is a
land divided by those who benefit from a legacy
of privilege and those who suffer from a legacy of
subjugation.
As I write this, the nation is in shock over
yet more killings of black men by police and the
subsequent murder of five policemen in Dallas.
Supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement are
marching through American cities, including many
in the West, arguing in essence that unchecked
power infringes on our fundamental sovereignty — a
human being’s sovereignty over his or her own body,
over his or her own safety and security.
Understood this way, sovereignty is lacking for
many in America. It is lacking in other ways, as well.
For tribes, the issue has been addressed haltingly
at best over the past 150 years. In Alaska, the
struggle is ongoing. As correspondent Krista Langlois
reports in this issue’s cover story, a year-old tribal
commission is working with the federal government
to give Alaska Natives more say in the annual
harvest of salmon, on which their people and culture
depend. This hopeful development stems solely from
the tireless efforts of a new generation of tribal
leaders, who have had to battle an entrenched state
government every step of the way.
For the tribes, and indeed for communities
throughout the West, sovereignty and survival are
inextricably linked. The horrendous events of recent
weeks should make us reconsider the history of
our nation and region, acknowledging how they
were forged through violence and subjugation.
This legacy yet ripples through our society, in black
communities who live in fear of police power,
and through tribes who lack control of their own
resources and heritage.
We need people like Billy Frank Jr. and George
Boldt, people of character and conscience, now
more than ever. It can start here, with each of us,
with the simple, courageous act of seeing things
as they are. Black lives matter. Native lives matter.
What we say, what we do, what we don’t say, what
we don’t do — these, too, matter.
—Brian Calvert, managing editor
FBI nabs suspected BLM bomber
gallons of groundwater
that have been lost
from the Colorado
River Basin since NASA
satellites began collecting data about it in
2004. Heavy groundwater pumping played
a large role.
SARAH TORY MORE:
hcne.ws/coriver-supply “One man lost
two family
members to
drugs and
drug violence,
so he decided
to head to the
border to help
disrupt the
narco trails.”
Photos
Unofficial border patrol
The Arizona Border Recon was founded
in 2011 to help patrol the U.S.-Mexico
border, collecting data on bordercrossing routes and turning back
anyone members deem illegal. The
group’s members are largely ex-military
or former law enforcement, driven to
join for reasons ranging from political
ideology to personal experience.
See their portraits.
MORE: hcne.ws/unofficial-patrol
—Photographer
Cory Johnson
CORY JOHNSON AND NEIL KREMER
Wyoming wind
resistance
In 2009, senior editor
Jonathan Thompson
wrote about Wyoming’s
stutter-step adoption
of wind power. The
unusual alliance of
the fossil fuel industry
and environmentalists,
driven by economic
and wildlife concerns,
stymied the wind industry’s growth and halted
projects in their tracks.
The pattern has continued in recent months:
the state passed a new
wind tax at the same
time that it looked to
wind to replace coal’s
decline.
You say
DICK MARSTON
“The fossil fuel
industry in Wyoming
is working hard to
thwart new development of wind energy.”
DIANE FISHLEY
SPENCER “Schools
could gain revenue
from wind resources in
the same way they are
now tapping extractive resources for tax
dollars.”
MATT DYCHES “The
wind causes a class 10
level of crazy there.”
MORE: Facebook.com/
highcountrynews
www.hcn.org High Country News 3
Send letters to [email protected] or
Editor, HCN, P.O. Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428.
LETTERS
High Country News
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR/PUBLISHER
Paul Larmer
MANAGING EDITOR
Brian Calvert
SENIOR EDITORS
Jodi Peterson
Jonathan Thompson
ART DIRECTOR
Cindy Wehling
ONLINE EDITOR
Tay Wiles
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Kate Schimel
D.C. CORRESPONDENT
Elizabeth Shogren
WRITERS ON THE RANGE
EDITOR Betsy Marston
ASSOCIATE DESIGNER
Brooke Warren
COPY EDITOR
Diane Sylvain
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Cally Carswell, Sarah
Gilman, Glenn Nelson,
Michelle Nijhuis
CORRESPONDENTS
Ben Goldfarb, Krista
Langlois, Sarah Tory,
Joshua Zaffos
EDITORIAL FELLOWS
Paige Blankenbuehler
Lyndsey Gilpin
INTERN
Anna V. Smith
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Alyssa Pinkerton
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AD SALES REPRESENTATIVE
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FOUNDER Tom Bell
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
John Belkin, Colo.
Chad Brown, Ore.
Beth Conover, Colo.
Jay Dean, Calif.
John Echohawk, Colo.
Bob Fulkerson, Nev.
Wayne Hare, Colo.
Laura Helmuth, Md.
John Heyneman, Wyo.
Osvel Hinojosa, Mexico
Samaria Jaffe, Calif.
Nicole Lampe, Ore.
Marla Painter, N.M.
Raynelle Rino-Southon,
Calif
Estee Rivera Murdock, D.C.
Dan Stonington, Wash.
Rick Tallman, Colo.
Luis Torres, N.M.
Andy Wiessner, Colo.
Florence Williams, D.C.
CURRENTS
CONFRONTING THE TERRORISTS
In the June 27, 2016, edition, Paul
Larmer wrote about the Malheur
National Wildlife Refuge occupation:
“Where were all the folks on the other
side — the public-lands patriots — the
people who say they cherish our country’s rare birthright of a vast landscape,
accessible to all Americans, no matter
where they live? So I emailed several
conservation leaders, asking them
whether they were going to the refuge to
protest the protesters. ‘It might be best
if everybody just lets the locals keep the
pressure on these guys, or if the press
pays a little less attention to them,’ one
replied. ...”
Letting the locals keep up pressure
on the Bundys was far from sufficient.
Whichever “conservation leader” said
that to Mr. Larmer misses the mark by
a mile. The current version of the Sagebrush Rebellion is far from emasculated.
Kierán Suckling, executive director
of the Center for Biological Diversity,
was there at Malheur during the Bundy
Boys’ invasion. He confronted those
terrorists. There were a half-dozen or
so other public-lands patriots there,
too. The chickenshits who stayed home
did not walk their talk. Paul Larmer’s
column really should have honored
Kierán’s bravery and dedication.
Ricardo Small
Albany, Oregon and Tucson, Arizona
AN EQUITABLE SOLUTION
FOR NAVAJO VOTING
The article “Disenfranchised in Utah” in
the June 13th issue was quite interesting. Finding an equitable way to
partition regions into voting districts
has been an interest of mine for many
years. Gerrymandering is a serious
problem and has been used to entrench
the existing power structure, as it has
been in this case. However, when you
compare the existing situation with the
proposal from the Navajo Nation, they
both gerrymander, pretty much to the
same degree. This is obvious when you
substitute “Anglo” for “Native American” in the Navajo proposal. They both
have one highly concentrated district
that is 93 to 94 percent for one group
and apportions the other two groups
more or less equally. The only difference
is in the bias toward one group or the
other. The overall percentages of population for the two groups are 51 percent
Navajo and 49 percent other (Anglo). An equitable solution would have equal
numbers of representatives from the
High
Country
News
The path of lease resistance
Escalating protests against drilling on public lands
usher in online auctions
BY JOSHUA ZAFFOS
O
MIKE KEEFE, CAGLECARTOONS.COM
two groups elected. The problem is that
there are three districts, i.e., one-anda-half persons elected from each group,
which is not feasible.
A more equitable solution would
be to have one predominantly Navajo
district, one predominantly Anglo district, and the third district would be 51
percent Navajo and 49 percent other.
The third district would be the most
interesting: It would encourage greater
participation in the election process,
since each vote could be the determining
vote for the outcome. Finally, it is possible to create a
computer program that would be able
to determine equitable districts in such
cases. This program would be designed
to ensure significant minority groups
would have representation in proportion
to their overall numbers. The data to do
this exist. The program to do this can be
written. The only problem would be in
adopting such an approach.
Ken Young
Petrolia, California
VALUING WATER
Thanks to Hillary Rosner and HCN
for the June 13 article on the plight of
south-central Oregon’s dying lakes and
its adverse effects on migratory birds.
Oregonians value water for food production, environmental services and the
recreational opportunities it provides.
However, existing water law, developed
when horses were the main form of
transport, has lagged behind changing
values. Even Idaho has installed meters
on water diversions and reports water
use. We need to act as if water was truly
High Country News is a nonprofit 501(c)(3)
independent media organization that covers the
issues that define the American West. Its mission is
to inform and inspire people to act on behalf of the
region’s diverse natural and human communities.
valuable. Let’s start with a fee on the
largest diversions and use the funds to
improve monitoring and reporting, and
fund instream-flow enhancements.
Ronald J. Larson
Klamath Falls, Oregon
CROSS-BORDER COOPERATION,
NOT WALLS
The recent jaguar article (“Cats along
the border,” HCN, 5/30/16) highlights
the importance of cross-border migration and habitat required by jaguars,
ocelots, coati, javelina, opossum, skunk,
deer and Mexican wolves in order to
sustain viable populations. Donald
Trump’s 20-foot wall all along the border would preclude that possibility and
cause enduring harm to that ecosystem
on both sides of the border.
What is important is a designation
of a border ecosystem by Mexico and the
United States to ensure the continued
viability of flourishing populations of
both plants and animals native to that
area, with the cooperation and participation of local ranchers. Genetic diversity could be encouraged with cross-border cooperation that facilitates stronger
animal communities by an exchange of
animals across the border.
Wildlife migratory corridors should
be designated, hunting and trapping
prohibited, and corridor movement
encouraged.
John Shellenberger
Bozeman, Montana
(ISSN/0191/5657) is published bi-weekly, 22 times a year, by High Country News, 119 Grand
Ave., Paonia, CO 81428. Periodicals, postage paid at Paonia, CO, and other post offices.
POSTMASTER: Send address changes to High Country News, Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428. All
rights to publication of articles in this issue are reserved. See hcn.org for submission guidelines.
Subscriptions to HCN are $37 a year, $47 for institutions: 800-905-1155 | hcn.org
Printed on
recycled paper.
n a Thursday afternoon in May, hundreds of climate activists jammed the
parking lot and lobby of a Denver Holiday
Inn, blockading the entrance and chanting, “We are unstoppable! Another world
is possible!” They were trying to halt a
U.S. Bureau of Land Management oil and
gas lease sale, but succeeded only in delaying it for a few minutes. Still, the protesters left pleased that they had drummed up
media coverage and riled industry representatives.
Lease sales, where energy companies
bid for the right to drill for oil and gas on
federal land, used to be mundane events.
But lately they’ve become raucous, with
climate activists in Salt Lake City, Denver
and Reno urging the government to leave
fossil fuels in the ground. Eventually, they
hope to end public-lands drilling altogether.
In response, some industry leaders want
auctions to move online — eBay style. The
BLM agrees, and will host its first online
sale this September. Explaining the move
to Congress this March, BLM Director Neil
Kornze said online sales are cheaper to host
and will speed up transactions. He added
that the agency is on “heightened alert”
and concerned about safety as a result of
incidents like the militia occupation at Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
“And so a situation that we are not used to
— separating out who is a bidder and who
is not — gives us pause,” Kornze said.
So far, environmentalists are uncertain whether an online system will help or
hurt their cause. “If this is part of a broader effort to make BLM processes more efficient and transparent, it’s a great idea,”
says Nada Culver, director of The Wilderness Society’s BLM Action Center. But if
it simply allows energy companies to escape growing scrutiny, “it’s not progress.”
ated without public input. That has been
changing under President Barack Obama.
Since 2010, the BLM has ushered in a series of reforms designed to increase community involvement, including in decisions over where and how drilling occurs.
Now industry has its own complaints.
Since 2010, the BLM has held fewer auctions in order to save money, and fewer
parcels have been offered, says Kathleen
Sgamma with the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas trade group. Though
production at existing wells has slowed
due to the current glut of gas and oil, companies need new leases to prepare for the
market’s next uptick, Sgamma says. She
hopes online auctions will allow the BLM
to open more parcels to bidding.
But protests are also a factor. The
BLM first considered moving things online after climate activist Tim DeChristopher successfully bid on 14 parcels in
Utah in 2008 with no intention of paying
or drilling them. DeChristopher went to
prison for 21 months, and helped spark
the campaign to halt public-lands drilling.
This fall, the BLM will begin phasing
in online-only lease sales. Some environmental groups see the shift as further
evidence of industry’s undue influence
on public lands, since it could help screen
out non-industry bidders, such as author
and environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams, who bought parcels at a
Salt Lake City sale in February. Jason
Schwartz, spokesman for Greenpeace
USA, argues that the agency is caving to
“industry pressure to take the auctions
somewhere protests can’t find them.”
But others, like The Wilderness Society,
believe that online leasing could increase
transparency. Under the current system,
companies nominate parcels anonymously
and often pay independent land-men to bid,
making it hard to tell who bought what.
This kind of information matters to communities, Culver says, because some companies are more responsible than others.
Companies can also stockpile leases
and then receive “suspensions” that allow
them to hold onto parcels without developing them within 10 years — a delay that
can cost taxpayers millions of dollars in
lost rents and royalty payments. A 2015
analysis by The Wilderness Society tallied
3.25 million acres of suspended oil and
gas leases in the West, some dating to the
1970s. The practice also locks in development rights, even if they conflict with conservation, recreation or other emerging
local land uses. “All of that is very much
shielded from the public view,” adds Culver, whose group pored over paper files in
numerous field offices. “Once the lease is
sold, it kind of disappears.” A web-based
database detailing leases and terms could
make such trends easier to track.
The industry isn’t interested in creating an online information clearinghouse,
however, nor has the BLM suggested doing so. But even if online auctions completely replace in-person sales and make
it harder to protest, Schwartz says activists won’t be stopped.
The Wilderness Society isn’t involved
with the protest movement, but Culver
agrees that the drilling dissenters are here
to stay. “There is a general heightening of
awareness of how much control the oil and
gas industry has in this process,” she says.
And people are more engaged than they’ve
ever been: “It’s a brand-new and not necessarily comfortable day for the industry.”
WATERSHED ASSOCIATES
THE L ATEST
Backstory
Dirt and crushed
gravel from the West’s
hundreds of thousands
of miles of logging
roads often erodes
into nearby streams,
where it can harm
water quality and fish.
State regulation of
road runoff varies, so a
2003 Oregon lawsuit
sought to require
federal regulation by
the Environmental
Protection Agency
(“Oregon ignores
logging road runoff,
to the peril of native
fish,” HCN, 7/27/12).
Despite some
success in lower
courts, in 2013 the
U.S. Supreme Court
ruled that the EPA
is not required to
control sediment
from such roads.
Followup
In July, the EPA
upheld that policy.
The agency argued
that streams are
already adequately
protected by the
Clean Water Act and
by regional programs
that tailor soil
erosion management
according to
local climate and
topographies. A
spokeswoman from
the Environmental
Defense Center, which
brought the suit, says
the decision is “a lost
opportunity for muchneeded improvements
in water quality for
public health.”
T
he BLM manages over 1 million square
miles’ worth of underground minerals,
enough to cover Alaska, Texas and then
some. The development process goes like
this: The agency identifies areas it deems
appropriate for drilling, and then industry nominates parcels up to 2,560 acres.
Those then go up for sale at quarterly auctions, where bidding starts at $2 an acre.
Environmentalists have long argued
that the system is too accommodating
to industry. For instance, the details of
lease terms, such as exemptions from environmental analyses, are often negotiCorrespondent Joshua Zaffos writes from Fort
Collins, Colorado.  @jzaffos
Water eroding
an unpaved road
delivers fine
sediment to a creek
in California. PACIFIC
PAIGE
BLANKENBUEHLER
An oil and gas lease auction in Wyoming, where members of the Wyoming Outdoor Council,
Center for Biological Diversity and WildEarth Guardians protested. WILDEARTH GUARDIANS
Snapshot
The good, the bad, and the ugly of drones
As the aerial technology grows in popularity, so do its impacts
T
he Zapata Ranch in southern Colorado is one of the few places that
bison can still roam freely. Until recently, scientists and volunteers
surveyed the herd the old-fashioned way: with binoculars and the naked
eye. “It’s a shock how you can lose track of 2,000 bison on a 45,000-acre
unfenced pasture,” says Chris Prague, Colorado Nature Conservancy senior
conservation ecologist. But last year, The Nature Conservancy counted the
herd using an increasingly ubiquitous conservation tool: an unmanned aerial
vehicle, more commonly known as a drone.
Drones can be cheaper, more efficient and safer than traditional
manned aircraft, and may also provide more accurate data. A six-bladed
drone and camera costs about $1,500, and can deliver imagery with
resolution at the centimeter level. Government agencies and nonprofits
are already exploring their use in conservation, land management and
wildland firefighting, with at least a dozen pilot projects currently in the
works.
But introducing new technology to wild areas is tricky. Drones may
unduly stress wildlife, as a study of black bears in Current Biology last
year demonstrated. Recreational drones have also endangered wildland
firefighting crews.
And problems will likely mount as drone sales outpace regulations. From
2014 to 2015, recreational drone sales jumped from 430,000 to 700,000,
according to the Consumer Technology Association. Although the Federal
Aviation Administration now requires owners to register recreational drones,
public education remains one of the few tools to combat irresponsible users.
In this technological Wild West, some drone uses are good, some bad, and
some downright ugly. KATIE VANE
The Good
The Bad
The Ugly
Surveying on land
In 2012, the U.S. Geological Survey used a
drone to count 15,000 roosting sandhill cranes
in only four hours. By using an infrared camera
in the southern Colorado Monte Vista Wildlife
Refuge at night, the drone avoided startling
roosting birds. This benefited both birds and
surveyors, since manned aircraft often scare
cranes into flight, potentially causing mid-air
collisions.
Oceanside scares
Université de Montpellier researcher Elisabeth
Vas and her French colleagues used a small
quadcopter to test reactions in three waterbirds:
semi-captive mallard ducks, wild flamingos and
wild common greenshanks. They did not appear
to respond to the drone’s speed, color or number
of approaches, but when it approached at a
90-degree angle, like a predator, most birds either
moved or flew off, potential signs of stress.
Firefighting interference
A recreational drone disrupted firefighting during
California’s 2015 Lake Fire in the San Bernardino
National Forest. When pilots spotted a fixed-wing
drone with a four-foot wingspan about 1,500
feet over the fire, firefighters had to call off three
air tankers to avoid a mid-air collision. There
were 21 similar incidents that year. The U.S.
Forest Service coined a new slogan, “If you fly,
we can’t.”
Dammed if you do,
dammed if you don’t
Feds propose measures to reduce Glen Canyon Dam’s impact
on the Grand Canyon — a bit
BY CALLY CARSWELL
ILLUSTRATIONS: PABLO IGLESIAS
I
Counting at sea
NOAA Fisheries biologist Wayne Perryman has
used drones since 2011 to count penguins,
leopard seals and fur seals in Antarctic colonies.
“Humans are just lousy at estimating,” says
Perryman. Last year, he integrated drones into an
annual gray whale survey off the California coast.
The imagery is so good that scientists can track
individual whales and monitor their health — even
determine whether females are pregnant. Drones
may also save lives: From 1937 to 2000, twothirds of all job-related deaths among U.S. wildlife
biologists were attributed to aviation accidents.
Starting prescribed fires
This year, at Nebraska’s Homestead National
Monument of America, the Interior Department
worked with the University of Nebraska and
the National Park Service to test a drone for
prescribed burns. The drone injects chemicalfilled pingpong balls with glycol and drops them
into an unburned area, where they ignite within
minutes.
Stressed-out bears
Researcher Mark Ditmer at the University of
Minnesota’s Department of Fisheries, Wildlife
and Conservation Biology discovered that even
when black bears exhibited no visible reaction to
a nearby quadcopter, their heart rates rose, with
one bear’s quadrupling from 40 to 160 beats
per minute. Long-term stress could affect health,
while fleeing animals risk dangerous encounters
with traffic or other animals. Ditmer is currently
investigating whether black bears can become
used to drones.
Sheep on the run
The National Park Service temporarily banned
drones after a 2014 incident, in which a
recreational drone frightened bighorn sheep,
separating a ewe from its young. Even with the
ban, Zion National Park reports that visitors have
spotted several drones, and the park has found at
least one crashed machine. The agency is working
on new regulations.
Fear by the bay
In 2014, two drones startled a herd of pupping
harbor seals in California’s Monterey Bay National
Marine Sanctuary into the water. Fortunately, no
pups were separated from their mothers, trampled
or killed.
f the San Juan River were a freeway,
Glen Canyon Dam would be a 50-car
pile-up. It forces the river to back up and
spread out for dozens of miles. As the river
morphs into Lake Powell, the sand in its
current settles out. A rock overhang at
Grand Gulch where boaters once lounged
is now buried more than 30 feet deep.
Before the dam killed the current, the
San Juan carried all of this silt to the Colorado, which spit much of it through the
Grand Canyon, replenishing hundreds of
sandbars. These expansive blonde beaches, which form in eddies, are river runners’
favorite campsites, and they provide backwater habitat for fish. But today, about 95
percent of the sediment that once washed
through the canyon sits at the bottom
of Lake Powell, and the sandbars have
shrunk: The Colorado erodes them, but
doesn’t build them back up.
This is one of the problems the 1992
Grand Canyon Protection Act was supposed to correct. It directed federal officials to figure out how to manage the dam
in a way that did less harm and even protected the national park’s assets. In addition to threatened sandbars, three of eight
fish species native to the Grand Canyon
have disappeared since the dam went up,
and two are endangered.
But can altering dam operations reContributing editor Cally Carswell writes from
Santa Fe, New Mexico.  @callycarswell
ally help the river when the dam itself
imperils it? Scientists have explored this
question since 1992, and their research
informs the Bureau of Reclamation’s draft
management plan for the dam’s next 20
years, released earlier this year. Conservationists are optimistic that it will yield
improvements downstream, but only
small ones. “You’re really just trying to
make the best of a bad deal,” says Utah
State University watershed sciences professor Jack Schmidt.
T
his is the second such plan for Glen
Canyon Dam. The first, in 1996, allowed managers to unleash experimental
floods to flush sediment from downstream
tributaries — the 5 percent not stuck behind the dam — through the canyon. They
hoped a rush of silty water would rebuild
sandbars. But the floods were politically
and logistically difficult, since they resulted in lost hydropower, and the Bureau
had to complete complicated environmental assessments before each one. Years
passed between floods in 1996, 2004 and
2008, limiting their efficacy. While they
did boost sandbars, within six months or
so, the beaches eroded again.
Then, in 2012, then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar authorized floods to occur whenever conditions were right until
2020. Floodwater thundered through the
canyon in 2012, 2013 and 2014. It’s unclear if frequent floods can make sandbars
larger over time, says Paul Grams, a U.S.
Geological Survey researcher, but monitoring suggests they can at least stop further decline.
The new plan goes further by making
floods a permanent feature of dam management. “That’s a big deal,” says Ted
Kennedy, a native fish biologist with the
Grand Canyon Research and Monitoring Center. “Those high-flow experiments
were really hard to get implemented.”
The plan will also kick off new experiments to help fish like the endangered
humpback chub. These fish evolved in
turbid desert rivers that could reach 85
degrees in summer. Today’s Colorado is
a different world: The dam releases water from Lake Powell’s cold depths, and
near it, the river hovers around 46 degrees year-round. There’s no way to warm
these areas without either draining the
reservoir, or adding expensive infrastructure that lets the dam release water from
warmer layers near the surface. Neither
option is currently on the table.
But there might be other ways to help
fish, Kennedy says. Chub spawn almost exclusively in the toasty Little Colorado, then
move into nearby parts of the mainstem
Colorado, where their growth is inhibited
by chilly water. The water does warm as
the river twists further from the dam, but
though it should be good habitat, few chub
live in these downstream reaches.
Scientists think that could be because
there aren’t enough bugs to eat there.
Aquatic insects lay their eggs at river’s
edge, and when the water level drops, as it
does daily when water releases fluctuate
with hydropower demand, the stranded
eggs shrivel and die.
The plan proposes to eliminate flow
fluctuations on spring and summer weekends, when electricity demand isn’t quite
as high, in hopes of keeping eggs wet and
boosting insect numbers. More food might
help chub populations colonize and prosper in the river’s lower reaches.
Eric Balken of the Glen Canyon Institute is glad that the Bureau is trying to
improve the river’s health. “But it’s just
a Band-Aid on a gaping wound,” he says.
“What we’re not happy with is that they
more or less ignored ideas that they considered outside-the-box thinking.” These
include requiring Lake Mead to be filled
before any water is stored in Lake Powell,
which would reduce the water lost to seepage in the system, warm the river, and allow Glen Canyon to emerge from submersion by draining much if not all of Powell.
The plan, instead, represents “the art
of the possible,” says David Nimkin, with
the National Parks Conservation Association. He thinks it will yield positive, but
marginal, gains. “You can do more harm
than you can do benefit with the dam,” he
says. “Glen Canyon Dam, for the time that
it operates, has a profound impact. And
that’s a fact.”
A sandbar gained
sediment after a
controlled flood was
released from Glen
Canyon Dam in 2012.
U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
“It’s just
a Band-Aid
on a gaping
wound.”
—Eric Balken,
Glen Canyon Institute
Land transfer support, county by county
A male red tree vole in a Douglas fir. The
species is one of many that received special
protection under the 1994 Northwest Forest
Plan, due to its reliance on the Pacific
Northwest’s dwindling old-growth forests.
The American Lands Council has galvanized county commissioners to back federal land transfers
MICHAEL DURHAM
BY TAY WILES
I
n 2012, after a series of land-management conflicts with the U.S.
Forest Service, Elko County, Nevada,
Commissioner Demar Dahl decided to try
a different approach: He helped launch
a national nonprofit whose mission is
to force the government to transfer federal lands to state control. The American
Lands Council (ALC) has since become the
center of the growing land-transfer movement. How it operates is not entirely clear,
but counties help fund the group’s campaign by purchasing yearly memberships.
Online Editor Tay Wiles is based in Paonia, Colorado, and writes about conflicts on public lands.
 @taywiles
“As long as this topic stays in the news,”
says ALC-supporter and Montezuma
County, Colorado, Commissioner Larry
Don Suckla, “we will come to a conclusion
where everyone gets on board.”
One way the ALC has tried to influence the public-land dialogue was to hire
Utah Rep. Ken Ivory as president, a position he held until last year. Through legislative channels, he has pushed the idea
that the states should manage natural resources. Now, counties across the West are
divided over the controversial issue.
ALC memberships for government
entities like counties, individuals and
businesses — which range from $50 to
$25,000 — supplied $259,189 of the
Western counties and the American Lands Council
ALC Member?
SEATTLE
YES
FORMERLY
NO
ACTIVELY OPPOSE
UNKNOWN
SPOKANE
HELENA
WA
BILLINGS
MT
PORTLAND
Information for
counties outlined in
yellow are from data
prior to 2015. If you
have more recent data
for your county, help
us update it by sending a letter or email to
[email protected].
WY
EUGENE
BOISE
OR
CA
ID
NV
CHEYENNE
SALT LAKE CITY
BOULDER
RENO
DENVER
UT
SAN JOSE
CO
LAS VEGAS
SANTA FE
ALBUQUERQUE
LOS ANGELES
PHOENIX
TUCSON
AZ
NM
group’s $336,524 total revenue for 2014,
the latest data available. Another $59,729
came from other donors, according to tax
records. It’s not clear how much of this is
also from member counties, or from supporters like Americans for Prosperity, the
right-wing advocacy group funded by billionaires David and Charles Koch. (Ivory
has said ALC never received money from
the Kochs, though Americans for Prosperity has appeared on its list of donors in the
past.)
A year ago, many of the ALC’s county members were listed on its website.
That’s no longer the case, and the person
answering phones at the group’s headquarters in Utah says she is not authorized to provide any information, about
anything. But High Country News has
begun compiling a complete list of ALC
member counties.
Our analysis reveals that Nevada and
Utah are ALC strongholds: At least 21 of
Utah’s 29 counties, and 11 of Nevada’s
16, officially supported the land-transfer
group. Nevada now has its own landtransfer nonprofit, which offers memberships: the Nevada Lands Council, headed
by Commissioner Dahl. Three southwestern Utah counties — Iron, Washington
and Kane — recently topped the list of
high-paying ALC members, with either
“Gold” ($10,000) or “Platinum” ($25,000)
memberships.
Yet even in those states, some counties
have reduced their contributions. Daggett
County, Utah, for example, decided this
year not to renew its membership, which
it had held for the last three years. And
in other states, opposition to the transfer
idea is gaining momentum. Blaine County,
Idaho, and Arizona’s Pima and Coconino
counties have passed resolutions opposing a federal land transfer. Nine Colorado
counties have passed similar resolutions:
Park, Pitkin, Eagle, Boulder, La Plata, San
Miguel, Ouray, Summit and San Juan.
Intern Anna V. Smith contributed reporting.
SOURCES: UTAH.GOV/TRANSPARENCY, ARCHIVED WEBPAGES OF
THE ALC WEBSITE, MEDIA REPORTS, ORIGINAL REPORTING.
landscape, regardless of agency boundaries, says David Moryc, senior director of
river protection at American Rivers. “If
we’re calving off a big section and looking at it differently, that will by its nature
have major ramifications for the health of
the ecosystem.” Worse, says veteran Oregon forest advocate Andy Kerr, it seems
like a bad omen for the Forest Service’s
approaching updates to its own portion of
the Northwest Forest Plan.
T
BLM moves away from landmark
Northwest Forest Plan
Imminent court showdown may force agency
to reconsider logging goals
BY SARAH GILMAN
C
runching across a brushy, logged-over
slope near Corvallis, Oregon, Reed
Wilson points his trekking pole at an ancient Douglas fir in a neighboring patch of
forest. The tree is more than an armspan
in diameter, its toes decorated with saprophytic orchids and millipedes.
One of 117 behemoths among these
otherwise young stands, this tree and 38
others also wear necklaces of pink tape.
Tree-climbing citizen surveyors left them
to mark the presence of red tree vole
nests, explains Wilson, a gray-haired local
jeweler and activist. The tiny rodents devour conifer needles and use the hair-like
resin ducts to build pillowy abodes in the
trees’ branches. Most vole business takes
place high in the canopy — interlaced
limbs offering access to other trees, food,
mates and new homes. The vole is also
favored prey for the threatened northern
spotted owl, and its population here in the
low-slung northern Coast Range is a candidate for endangered species protection.
The federal government set aside this
area as part of a 10-million-acre network
of reserves in western Oregon, Washington and Northern California, largely to
protect species like spotted owls and voles
whose old-growth habitat was being deContributing editor Sarah Gilman writes from
Portland, Oregon.  @Sarah_Gilman
stroyed by logging. In 2009, though, the
Bureau of Land Management proposed a
commercial project to thin younger trees
here, ostensibly to restore more diverse
forest structure. And though the Benton
Forest Coalition, to which Wilson belongs,
and two other environmental groups
forced the agency to leave intact forest
around most of the vole trees, several
stand alone amid logging slash, their tiny
tenants marooned and more vulnerable to
predation. “This was native forest,” regenerating from a 1931 wildfire, Wilson says.
“It hadn’t been logged before.”
Now, the BLM is proposing a pair of
new management plans for its 2.5 million
acres in western Oregon. Several environmental groups fear the plans could make
it even easier to allow destructive logging
inside old-growth reserves.
They also signal the agency’s departure from the 1994 Northwest Forest
Plan, which created the reserves in the
first place to help end a bitter struggle
over Northwestern forests. The landmark
agreement allowed some logging while
emphasizing ecosystem preservation on
24.5 million acres of federal land, 80 percent of it overseen by the Forest Service
and most of the rest divided between the
BLM and National Park Service. Part of
the agreement’s strength was that it unified forest management across an entire
he BLM’s revisions have roots in the
1937 federal Oregon and California
Lands Act, which covers most of the
agency’s heavily checkerboarded western Oregon lands. The “O&C Act” aimed
to halt the turn-of-the century timber
industry’s cut-and-run approach, denuding lands and then abandoning communities. It mandates that the BLM manage
forests to provide a “sustained yield” of
timber — never cutting more than can
grow back annually, but also ensuring a
steady supply in perpetuity. The federal
government was also supposed to pass 50
percent of net logging revenues to 18 western Oregon counties to help make up for
the lack of tax revenue from those O&C
lands, though this function has since been
covered and augmented by a safety net
law called the Secure Rural Schools and
Community Self-Determination Act.
The Northwest Forest Plan was expected to supply 1.1 billion board-feet
from national forest and BLM land annually, including through clear-cutting
old growth outside reserves. But logging
fluctuated with congressional appropriations, economic factors and environmental lawsuits, and the cut was lower than
anticipated.
Amid the scuffling, both the BLM and
Forest Service shifted to timber programs
that emphasized thinning younger forests,
including those recovering from clear-cuts.
This approach is less controversial than
clear-cutting, but the BLM supply will
run out in less than 10 years, says Mark
Brown, project manager on the agency’s
plans. The BLM also faces new federal
spotted owl protections, including critical
habitat designated in 2012. “The balance
we’re trying to strike is fulfilling our responsibilities under the O&C Act, while
also meeting our responsibilities under
laws like the Endangered Species Act and
Clean Water Act,” Brown says. “When we
fulfill all of those, we don’t have a lot of
decision space.”
The proposed plans would increase
the timber harvest more than a third over
Please see Forest, page 18
A wild horse foal
amid the herd in the
Cedar Mountains
of Utah.
HANNAH COWAN/BLM
THE L ATEST
Backstory
Wild horses have
been federally
protected since
1971, and with about
67,000 roaming
public land — far
more than the land
can support — they’ve
become one of the
West’s most expensive
and polarizing natural
resource problems.
The Bureau of Land
Management uses
about 7 percent
of its budget to
manage them, and
over 45,000 are
held permanently
in corrals. Ranchers,
environmentalists and
horse-lovers agree the
population must be
controlled, but the
BLM’s methods remain
controversial (“Is
there a way through
the West’s bitter
horse wars?” HCN,
11/9/12).
Followup
In late June, the BLM
announced plans
to study surgical
sterilization to see
if it’s more effective
than contraceptive
vaccines. One of the
first projects involves
removing the ovaries
of over 100 wild mares
in Oregon. At a recent
congressional hearing,
however, that proposal
prompted a shouting
match, with horse
advocates angrily
insisting that the
animals be allowed to
roam freely without
human interference.
LYNDSEY GILPIN
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DEATH VALLEY: PAINTED LIGHT
Photographs and text by Stephen E. Strom
184 pages, hardcover, $50.
George F. Thompson Publishing, 2016
“Death Valley is a destination for the visually curious,” says essayist Rebecca Senf in her
introduction to Death Valley: Painted Light, a collection of photographs and ruminations by
photographer and author Stephen E. Strom and poet Alison Hawthorne Deming. Strom has been
photographing the area for more than 35 years, and his strikingly minimalist images illuminate
its otherworldly shapes and geometric surprises. Many are simple texture shots, revealing the
desert’s unexpected nuances: The dimpled sand on a vast landscape, for instance, at first glance
resembles nothing more than a spackled sheet of old wallpaper. Deming’s poems are equally
sprawling and textured, using scenes of Death Valley to tap into deeper themes. “Sometimes it
seems as if time is the material of which we’re made. Grain by grain we add up like sand ground
down to gritty beads by an archaic sea.” PAIGE BLANKENBUEHLER
Hillsides, Panamint Mountains, left. Detail, Saline Valley Dunes I, center. Salt
outcroppings, Devil’s Golf Course, right. STEPHEN E. STROM
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Howard Whiteside & Machaella Hautala |
Osburn, ID
Grant Wiegert | Luray, VA
Penington Wimbush | Dillon, CO
Steve Wyant | Fort Collins, CO
During our publication break,
which just ended, we bid a fond
farewell to former intern Bryce
Gray, who wrapped up his session at the end of June. He’s
now the full-time energy and
environment reporter at the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch. Congrats
to Bryce, and even more to the
Post-Dispatch: Y’all have landed
yourself a fine journalist!
Now we’re welcoming Anna
V. Smith for six months of
“journalism boot camp.” Anna,
23, spent much of her childhood
in Oregon’s Willamette Valley,
climbing trees, exploring gullies
and replanting and nurturing
more than 5,000 Douglas firs
with her family, often knee-deep
in mud during torrential rains.
She left rural Oregon in 2010
to attend the University of Oregon in Eugene, where she majored in environmental studies
and journalism. She helped start
the campus’ first environmentally focused publication, Envision,
a student-run print and online
magazine, serving as web editor
from 2012 to 2014, and covering
the rural-urban divide regarding
wolf reintroduction.
Anna often felt pulled between science and writing, but
an internship in Central Africa
in 2013 with the Smithsonian
Institute’s Gabon Biodiversity
Program convinced her that she
preferred writing about science
to conducting it.
After graduating in 2014,
she began reporting for Eugene
Weekly, where she wrote about
local struggles with homelessness and affordable housing
as well the native bee decline.
She discovered HCN in college
and saw it as an ideal blend of
social, economic, cultural and
scientific coverage, all under the
umbrella of Western environmental issues.
Although she misses watching pods of orcas from her deck,
Anna looks forward to covering
wildlife and recreation for HCN.
She might even squeeze in some
time to explore the surrounding
mountains and canyons. Or so
she hopes. Welcome, Anna!
Somehow, we managed to
trick our other recent intern,
Lyndsey Gilpin, into sticking
around for another six months
as an editorial fellow. The hissing rattlesnakes we surrounded
her desk with may have influenced her decision, but we’re
sure it was genuine enthusiasm
for the job. Congrats, Lyndsey!
(It’s safe to come out now; the
snakes are gone.) She joins
Anna and our current fellow,
Paige Blankenbuehler, through
December at the magazine and
website.
A few corrections: In our
recent feature on Oregon’s terminal waterways, we misidentified the birds in a photo, calling
them barn swallows when they
were most likely cliff swallows
(“Water to dust,” 6/13/16). And
the ancestors of Stacy Bare,
profiled in our annual Outdoor
Recreation issue, were given
land in West Virginia, not Pennsylvania. Our apologies.
—Paige Blankenbuehler,
for the staff
From left, editorial
fellow Paige
Blankenbuehler,
new editorial intern
Anna V. Smith and
new editorial fellow
Lyndsey Gilpin,
who will all write
some of the stories
you’ll read in High
Country News over
the next six months.
BROOKE WARREN
“Go and tell your people there is coming a time when there shall be very few fish
returning to this river, the Kuskokwim. The days of want and stealing are coming.”
—John Active, recounting a traditional Yup’ik story
Salmon Power
A historic legal victory could give Alaska tribes more control
over their fish, wildlife and homelands
FEATURE AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY KRISTA L ANGLOIS
M
Thomas Carl, Mike
Williams’ son-inlaw, takes a break
around midnight
from fishing for
chinook salmon
on the Kuskokwim
River.
ike Williams meets me at the airstrip on a drizzly
June evening, his vast girth squeezed behind the
wheel of a Toyota pickup. He wears blue sweatpants,
running sneakers, and a triple-XL Columbia rain jacket. “Welcome to Akiak,” he says, tossing my backpack into the bed of
his truck as if it weighs nothing. Then we go to the river.
Akiak, Alaska, hugs the bank of the Kuskokwim, the longest undammed river in the United States. The Kuskokwim
rises from the Alaska Range and parallels its better-known
cousin, the Yukon, through hundreds of miles of boreal forest and tundra. Just before the two rivers dissolve into the
Bering Sea, they fan out like tree roots over a wilderness the
size of Maine, an unfenced expanse speckled with ponds and
spider-webbed with game trails. Most of the area falls inside
the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, but here and there
tiny islands of civilization appear — Yup’ik villages on tribally owned land. Their residents live a largely subsistence
lifestyle, picking berries in August, hunting moose in the fall,
netting whitefish from beneath the winter ice. Each month is
its own season.
June, Williams tells me as we rumble down the dirt road,
is fish-camp season. The smokehouses should be bustling,
the town nearly empty as families scatter to their traditional
camps to catch, dry and smoke the chinook salmon just beginning to surge past.
But the smokehouses are empty. People mill impatiently
on the roads, waiting for the government to allow them to
set nets. They mutter about distant bureaucrats managing
a fishery they don’t understand. Old women speak of cutting
salmon like it’s a physical longing, an ache in their muscles
that can only be eased by the repetitive motion of slicing
through piles of bloody fish. “We’ve always lived here,” Williams says, gesturing at the delta. “The land was always here
and it was always ours. No matter when, how or where, it
was available to us.”
Today, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is in charge of
the land outside the village, and the migratory salmon that
pass through are governed by the Alaska Department of Fish
and Game, with some federal oversight. Tribal governments
like Akiak’s have fought to be involved in decision-making,
with little success until recently.
For years, it didn’t matter: There were enough salmon to
go around. But since 2010, the number of chinook, or king
salmon, returning to the Kuskokwim River has fallen by half,
from an average of 260,000 each year to 123,000. Scientists
don’t fully understand the reasons for the drop, but for
subsistence fishermen, one factor stands out: commercial
bycatch. In 2007, fishermen in the Bering Sea tossed out
130,000 dead chinooks they accidentally caught in their nets.
Not all of those would have returned to the Kuskokwim,
and biologists emphasize that bycatch represents a fraction
of the total fish mortality. But the numbers still chafe: In
2015, when commercial fishermen threw 125,000 chinooks
overboard, fishermen on the Kuskokwim were allotted
15,000. That’s roughly four fish per household; families say
they need 50 to get through the winter.
Mike Williams has five children, 11 grandchildren, one
great-grandchild and 50 sled dogs. He finds it unfathomable
that commercial operations waste salmon while he scrambles
to put food on the table. The closest real grocery store is 400
miles away in Anchorage. Lately, the Williamses have had to
supplement their diet with species they usually feed to their
dogs.
But the balance of power may be shifting for Alaska Natives. In 2013, a federal district judge set in motion the biggest change to Alaska land management in decades by granting Alaska tribes the right to put land into a trust overseen
by the federal government — a right already granted to all
tribes in the Lower 48. Ceding land to the feds might sound
like a cession of authority, but for the people of Akiak, it’s the
opposite. It means that this summer, as the rule stemming
from the decision goes into effect, they could gain the power
to manage their own fish and wildlife, as tribes in the rest of
the country can.
For the Williamses and other families, that can’t come
soon enough. Across Alaska, a changing climate and other
pressures are stressing migrations of caribou, salmon, walrus
and other wildlife. And many Alaska Natives believe that
their own knowledge –– honed over generations –– can sustain these animals and protect Indigenous interests better
than state or federal managers alone. “We want the fish to
survive,” says Ivan Martin Ivan, chief of Akiak. “Just like the
trees, the grass, the people. We’ve managed these resources
for many thousands of years, and we want to do so again.” www.hcn.org High Country News 13
Mike Williams and his
grandson, Kohle, in the
family’s living room in
Akiak, Alaska.
MIKE WILLIAMS WAS 7 IN 1959, when the
Territory of Alaska became a state. The
federal government required that Alaska
Natives get a formal education, but Akiak
had no high school. So, like many Yup’ik,
Williams attended Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools hundreds of miles
south. Teachers confiscated his traditional clothes, cut his hair and forced him to
speak English. “I felt violated,” he says.
But efforts to strip away Williams’
Yup’ik-ness only strengthened it. It was
1971, and the Red Power Movement was
in full swing: Native Americans were
fighting for stolen lands in court, marching on Washington, D.C., and occupying
Alcatraz, California, which they saw as a
symbol of their oppression (see essay page
23). As student body president of Oregon’s Chemawa Indian School, Williams
met tribal leaders from across the West.
Everyone was talking about land rights.
One of the loudest voices belonged to
Billy Frank Jr., a Nisqually leader who
staged a series of “fish-ins” in Washington state to protest regulations that
kept tribes from their traditional fishing grounds. The clashes became known
as the Fish Wars. Frank was a hero
that Williams could relate to: a Native
American fighting the cultural subjugation Williams had already experienced
through the boarding school system. The
two became friends, and Frank a mentor.
Meanwhile, back home, Frank’s
activism would also prove important: It
helped demonstrate that being corralled
into federally managed reservations had
stripped Lower 48 tribes of their power.
As the Alaska Federation of Natives,
the state and the federal government
negotiated the division of Alaska’s land
and natural resources, they sought an
alternative. Eventually, they agreed that
Alaska Natives would assume land ownership themselves, and adopt a Western
business model to manage it.
The federal Alaska Native Claims
Settlement Act of 1971, or ANCSA,
deeded 44 million acres to Alaska Natives, divided among 13 regional corporations and 229 village corporations — one
for each tribe. Corporations could profit
by developing the minerals, timber or oil
on their land. Each tribe also formed its
own government, and many would come
to own land transferred to them from village corporations or through other means.
Village corporation profits went to tribal
governments, while those from regional
corporations went to individual tribal
members, under a shareholder system.
This worked well for some tribes,
particularly those in regions with rich oil
and natural gas deposits, like the North
Slope. But many in the YukonKuskokwim Delta felt shortchanged.
Their wealth wasn’t in oil or minerals,
but in fish, birds and other animals. And
while ANCSA deeded land to Native
corporations, that land remained under
state control. Just as private businesses
and property owners must adhere to
rules and regulations set by their state
governments, so, too, must Alaska tribes
and corporations accede to state law
enforcement, hunting seasons, bag limits
and more. (On reservations, federal and
tribal law supersede state law.)
As the 1970s unfolded, several
laws and court decisions laid ANCSA’s
limitations painfully bare. First was the
historic 1974 Boldt Decision, spurred by
Billy Frank’s activism. It gave Northwest
tribes that had signed 1850s-era treaties the right to 50 percent of the region’s
total salmon catch, and laid the groundwork for other tribes that wanted greater
authority in managing fish and wildlife,
both on- and off-reservation.
The Boldt Decision was also a “thunderbolt” that set off a new era of tribal
sovereignty, says legal expert and historian Charles Wilkinson, who’s writing a
book on the decision. In 1975, Congress
passed the Indian Self-Determination
and Education Assistance Act, which provided federal funds for tribes to run their
own schools, courts and natural resource
departments. Soon after, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes created
the nation’s first federally designated
tribal wilderness, secured in-stream flows
for fish, and began negotiating for control
of a nearby dam.
In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
that hunting and fishing regulations set
by tribes on reservation land trump those
set by the state. New Mexico’s Mescalero
Apache Tribe responded by creating
hunting rules that differed from the
state’s and charging non-Natives to hunt
the reservation’s impressive elk herd, bolstering economic development. Tribes can
also operate their own police forces and
prosecute certain crimes on reservations,
even those committed by non-Natives.
Though socioeconomic problems continue
to plague many reservations, Sarah
Krakoff, an Indian law expert at the University of Colorado Boulder, says these
changes represent undeniable progress
toward self-governance.
Yet because they apply only to “Indian
Country” — a legal term for the land that
the federal government holds in trust for
Native Americans, including all reservations in the Lower 48 — Alaska Natives
have been largely excluded. Alaska tribes
technically possess the same sovereignty
as Lower 48 tribes, but without land on
which to exercise that sovereignty, it’s of
limited use. And Alaskan officials remain
stubbornly opposed to recognizing tribal
sovereignty, Krakoff says. “It’s kind of
mysterious. In a state like Alaska that’s
so far-flung, you’d think they’d embrace
(tribes taking control).”
This affects more than natural resources. The state also retains authority
over regulating alcohol and prosecuting
and punishing perpetrators of sexual and
domestic abuse, even in remote villages
located hundreds of miles from the nearest court, jail or state trooper, says Troy
Eid, chair of the bipartisan Indian Law
and Order Commission. The commission’s
2014 report found that this has contributed to major public safety problems:
Alaska Native villages have some of the
nation’s highest rates of sexual violence,
domestic abuse and suicide — higher
than most reservations in the Lower 48.
“Instead of respecting (tribal) sovereignty and self-government as other
states routinely do, Alaska tries to police
and judge Native citizens from afar using
too few people and resources,” Eid wrote
in a 2014 editorial for Alaska Dispatch
News. He calls the system “colonialism on
the cheap.” And it’s not just outdated, he
says — it’s dangerous.
MIKE WILLIAMS KNOWS THIS from experience. He was serving in the army in Korea when ANCSA became law, and when
he returned home in 1973, he fell into the
same black hole that would ultimately
claim his six brothers.
“They were famous drunks,” remembers one friend. Like other bush villages
at the time, says Williams, Akiak had no
police officers, no judicial system and no
social services. In the course of a single
generation, the Yup’ik had been transformed from a semi-nomadic people,
traveling with the seasons and living off
the land, to shareholders in a corporation
and permanent residents of an impoverished village. Most had few opportunities
for employment.
In 1974, the Williams brothers started
dying. Sitting in his living room after
a meal of whitefish, tundra greens and
akutaq (lard or seal oil with berries
and sugar), Mike ticks them off for me.
Ted was the first: “He’d just returned
from Vietnam and was not well. He had
nightmares. He started drinking heavily,
and one night he over-drank alcohol and
didn’t wake up. So that was Ted.” Williams holds up one stubby finger. “The
second one, Frankie, he went to Bethel
with his snow machine and bought booze.
On the way back, he drank so much that
he fell into an open hole in the ice and
drowned. And that’s Frankie.” He holds
up two fingers. Then a third for Timmy, a
fourth for Gerald, and a fifth for Bucko,
who shot himself in the head after drinking homebrew.
Williams gazes at the ceiling with
pouched brown eyes and raises a final
finger for Walter, who passed out and
died of smoke inhalation from a pot left
on the stove. “That was pretty hard on
me, losing all of them and being the only
one standing,” he says. “That’s why I’m
causing trouble like this land-into-trust
issue. Because I’m trying to make life
here better for people.”
Williams has been sober for 28 years
and is now a substance abuse counselor.
He’s mushed the Iditarod 15 times to
raise awareness about sobriety. If Akiak
and other dry villages were Indian Country, he says, they could go after bootleggers without waiting for state authorities,
and perhaps address the problem with restorative, community-based justice rather
than jail time. State troopers would be
required to enforce decisions made by
tribal police or courts, which they aren’t
currently. Alaska tribes with Indian
Country would also be able to set hunting
and fishing regulations on land held in
trust for them and negotiate with state
and federal agencies on a governmentto-government basis to manage fish and
wildlife on surrounding land.
Troy Eid, of the Law and Order
Commission, notes that creating Indian
Country isn’t the only way for Alaskan
tribes to gain such authority. The state
could voluntarily work with tribes.
But it has routinely chosen not to, Eid
says. Seven independent commissions
have concluded that putting law enforcement in the hands of Native villages
would make them safer, but the state
maintains a centralized judicial system.
As a result, dozens of Alaska Native
communities have no law enforcement
whatsoever. In all of rural Alaska, there
is only one women’s shelter. And when it
comes to fish and wildlife management,
tribes have only an advisory role, with
little actual power. Some tribal members,
for instance, would like to receive hunting and fishing priority when wildlife
populations are low. But although village
residents have priority on federal lands,
the state Constitution requires that an
Anglo lawyer in Anchorage receive the
same access to fish and game as a Native
hunter who lives in the bush with little
access to other food sources.
So in 2006, Williams and some friends
coordinated with the Native American
Rights Fund to sue the Department of the
Interior on behalf of four Native villages
— including Akiachak, just downriver
from Akiak — to remove the Interior
Department’s “Alaska exemption,” which
prevents Alaska tribes from putting land
into trust. After Alaska Natives prevailed,
Interior finalized a rule striking the
exemption. “We believe that deleting the
Alaska exemption is consistent with law
and consistent with the Obama administration’s strong intention to restore tribal
homelands,” Kevin Washburn, then-assistant secretary for Indian Affairs, said in a
2014 speech in Anchorage.
The momentum toward putting land
into trust stalled while the state appealed
the decision, but on July 1, the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Alaska
Natives’ victory. Unless there’s a further
appeal to the Supreme Court or a request
for a second opinion from the Court of
Appeals, which both seem unlikely, any of
Alaska’s 229 tribal governments will soon
be able to apply to have its land taken
into trust.
It’s not clear how many tribes would
opt in, but the impact could be sweeping:
Forty-three wrote to the Interior Department in favor of the rule, and several have
already begun the application process.
Akiak isn’t far behind, Williams says.
The Alaska
Constitution
requires that
an Anglo
lawyer in
Anchorage
receive the
same access
to fish and
game as a
Native hunter
who lives in
the bush with
little access
to other food
sources.
The Williams family fish camp near Bethel, Alaska. From left, 2-year-old Megan gets a close
look at the beating heart of a freshly killed salmon, while her mother, Sheila Carl, filets
chinook. Below, salmon for the extended Williams clan hang to dry. Last year, each family
only got about four chinooks; they say they need 50 to get through the sub-Arctic winter.
Yuko
n
Ri
ve
r
ALASKA
Bering
Sea
s
Ku
r
Akiachak Akiak
Bethel kokwim Rive
“Seems to me
this system
is tough on
us. Next year,
if you come
around, don’t
tell us what
to do! I don’t
go into your
country and
tell you what
to do! It’s not
right.”
—Yup’ik elder,
speaking at a U.S.
Fish and Wildlife
meeting outlining
fishing restrictions in
Akiachak last year
Anchorage
But there are still critics who argue
that Indian Country would add additional layers of federal bureaucracy to
Alaska’s already-complex land management. Tribal corporations sitting on oil or
gas deposits are unlikely to transfer their
land, since federal oversight could make
it harder to develop those resources. And
some fear that if Native villages put land
into trust, it could impact development,
too, because regional corporations often
own the subsurface mineral rights below
villages. Scholars writing in the American Indian Law Journal concluded that
corporations’ mineral rights wouldn’t
be impacted, but uncertainties over the
rule’s implications remain.
Given that, regional corporations
should be able to weigh in on, or even
veto, tribes’ applications for trust land,
says Aaron Schutt, president and CEO
of the regional Doyon corporation — one
of the largest landowners in the United
States, with more than 12 million acres.
“We generally support the concept of
trust land in Alaska,” Schutt says. “But
I think the benefits are overstated. …
When you go on other reservations in the
U.S., you can see that it doesn’t solve all
their issues.”
Other critics, including several Alaska
lawmakers, oppose the rule more sharply.
Alaska officials declined to comment
for this story, but the former attorney
general wrote in the state’s appeal that
having pockets of Indian Country scattered across Alaska’s patchwork of state,
federal and private land would create
“widespread uncertainty about govern-
mental jurisdiction.” The state could lose
its ability to impose “land use restrictions, natural resource management
requirements, and certain environmental
regulations.” And most significantly, in a
place already wary of federal oversight,
“trust land in Alaska would diminish the
state’s authority.”
That, say many opponents, is an outcome that must be avoided.
IN JUNE 2012, AKIAK FISHERMEN were so
desperate for salmon that they staged an
act of civil disobedience, modeled after
Billy Frank’s fish wars. Salmon runs
were, at the time, the lowest ever recorded, and state and federal wildlife managers denied Yup’ik advisors’ recommendation for a brief fishing window. So Akiak
elders instructed people to fish anyway.
As subsistence gillnetters illegally pulled
chinooks from the river, officers swarmed
the river. Twenty-three fishermen were
arrested and fined, and thousand-dollar
nets were confiscated. At subsequent
court hearings, grown men wept as they
described the impact of the salmon decline on their families and culture.
Each year since then, dozens more
fishermen have quietly broken the rules.
Each year, officials catch some and haul
them to court. And each time, the fishermen’s resolve strengthens.
Their anger was palpable at a meeting at Akiachak’s village offices last June,
where uniformed U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials explained the restrictions placed on
subsistence users’ 2015 salmon harvest.
Subsistence fishermen crowded the table
where the officers sat, spilling out of the
room, craning their necks to hear. There
were strict limits on everything from how
many salmon each family could take to
the size of the nets and the dates that
fishing was allowed. Fishermen had to fish
within the legal window, regardless of the
weather. If they had the wrong-sized net,
they’d have to travel to the town of Bethel
–– an all-day trip –– to buy the right one.
And because only a handful of “designated fishermen” were allowed to set nets,
residents feared that skills and cultural
traditions would no longer be passed down
to the next generation.
Listening to the rules with wide eyes,
the Akiachak fishermen grew agitated.
“Seems to me this system is tough on
us,” one elder said. He spoke for a few
minutes in Yup’ik, his tone rising. Then,
in English again, he burst out: “Next year,
if you come around, don’t tell us what to
do! I don’t go into your country and tell
you what to do! It’s not right.”
Unfortunately, there’s no easy fix —
no dam to remove that will cause the
fish to come swarming home. And there
are so many culprits to blame –– climate
change, overfishing, changes to the marine environment, commercial bycatch.
Putting land into trust might help, but
it won’t give individual tribes autonomy
over a fishery that stretches hundreds of
miles and is already governed by a tangle
of state and federal laws.
Mike Williams knows this. He’s made
it his mission to learn everything he can
about salmon. He reads scientific papers
and government rulings and translates
them into Yup’ik at village meetings.
He tells the other fishermen that they
have to make sacrifices now so their
grandchildren will know what it’s like to
haul a massive chinook from the depths
of the Kuskokwim. But Williams also
believes in action, so instead of waiting
for resolution of the Indian Country fight,
in the spring of 2015 he helped form the
Kuskokwim Intertribal Fish Commission,
modeled after the Washington-based
Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission.
The Kuskokwim commission seeks to
give tribes more sway in managing the
fishery, and Williams serves as its chair.
Now, a year later, it’s making headway. As long as chinook runs remain low,
tribes can petition the federal government to take over management from the
state, which they did again this year, to
ensure tribal members get priority for
the subsistence harvest. Then, in May,
the Intertribal Fish Commission and the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signed a
memorandum of understanding giving
tribes more power during those times
when management is under federal control. The memorandum mandates weekly
meetings between commission members
and federal officials, and requires Fish
and Wildlife officials to provide a written explanation for any decision they
make that goes against the commission’s
recommendations. Lew Coggins, a federal
fisheries biologist at Yukon Delta, says
that the real-time data collected by tribal
members and organized by the Intertribal Fish Commission has helped fisheries
managers double the 2016 subsistence
allotment over last year’s. Chinook runs
are still far below historic numbers, but
they’re steadily inching upward.
The state of Alaska isn’t formally part
of this collaboration, but John Linderman,
regional supervisor for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, says he and his
agency “acknowledge and respect” the
Intertribal Fish Commission and are open
to engaging with them. Like many officials,
Linderman is genuinely concerned for both
the salmon and the tribes’ survival. But
when it comes to the kind of unified management that the Intertribal Fish Commission wants, his hands are somewhat tied.
He and other state wildlife managers are
obligated to comply with the state constitution, which gives all residents equal access
to fish. “That’s something that none of us
have any control over,” Linderman says.
“It’s not our place to make law. It’s our
place to implement law.”
BY MID-JUNE, fish camp season is underway. Mike Williams’ wife, Maggie, bustles
around the house, filling a cooler with
Ziploc bags of caribou and goose meat
and packing a duffel with clothes. Several
grandchildren toddle underfoot, chasing a
miniature poodle that Maggie’s daughter
ordered off the internet from Montana.
Relatives stop by to grab lunch from a
simmering pot of moose stew.
Eventually, we load up Williams’
fishing boat — five adults, one teenager,
a 5-year-old, a 2-year-old and a dozen
dead fish. We push into the current. The
outboard motor churns through the river
like a blender cutting through a chocolate
shake. When we reach a nameless slough
walled in by high grassy banks, Williams
cuts the motor.
On a cold gray day after a winter of
disuse, the fish camp isn’t much to look at.
It consists of a plywood shack with a rusty
woodstove, peeling linoleum and 30 years’
worth of accumulated mosquito corpses.
Outside are cottonwood drying racks, a
smokehouse and two plywood tables.
Still, our arrival feels like a homecoming. Soon after we climb ashore, Williams’
daughter, Sheila, who’s five months
pregnant, hauls a 30-pound salmon
onto one of the plywood tables. With an
uluq, a moon-shaped knife, she slices
off the head, to save for fish-head soup.
She makes an incision the length of the
salmon’s white underbelly and pulls out
a fistful of guts. Carefully, she hands the
stomach to her 15-year-old sister, Christine, who will flatten it into jerky. The
rest goes into a bucket. She scrapes dark
blood from inside the salmon’s ribs.
The fish then goes to Maggie, who’s
ready at the second table to do the
more intricate work of filleting it to dry.
Depending on the fish, she’ll process it
in any number of ways — into long, thin
strips, perhaps, or meaty steaks. Maggie
Williams has been putting up salmon for
as long as she can recall. Like Christine,
she began with the guts and took on
greater responsibility with each passing
year. “I remember when my mom first
taught me to do this,” she says, deftly
nicking a strip of meat. “I made such a
mess! She said, ‘It’s OK. It’ll still dry.’ ”
Cutting the fish is essential to its
proper drying. So is the weather: Too
early, and it might be too damp. Too late,
and flies will lay eggs inside the flesh.
These are the kinds of decisions the
people of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta
want to make: when to fish, how to fish.
They want to be able to carry on their
traditions without armed outsiders confiscating their gear. They dream of a time
when the knowledge they’ve collected
over generations is considered as valid as
science gathered in a few seasons.
While the women cut fish, Williams
rests in a duct-taped chair, explaining the
year’s fishing rules in Yup’ik for perhaps
the sixth time that day on his cellphone.
Hanging up, he pushes his glasses up his
forehead and rubs his eyes. Juggling all
these court hearings, testimonies, meetings and negotiations is exhausting. He
sometimes thinks about giving up. But
then he looks out the window and sees
his two young granddaughters, watching seriously as their auntie and grandmother butcher the salmon, and he takes
a deep breath and starts over. Akiak and
other tribes will continue to advocate for
a greater voice in managing their fishery,
Williams tells me. And maybe someday
soon, the state will have no choice but to
listen.
The people
of the YukonKuskokwim
Delta dream
of a time
when the
knowledge
they’ve
collected over
generations
is considered
as valid
as science
gathered in a
few seasons.
Correspondent Krista
Langlois lives in
Durango, Colorado,
and frequently covers
Alaska.
 cestmoiLanglois
This coverage
is supported by
contributors to the
High Country News
Enterprise Journalism
Fund.
MARKETPL ACE
MARKETPL ACE
Forest continued from page 9
present levels, to 278 million board-feet,
by returning to more aggressive logging
on a smaller portion of forest. Simultaneously, they boost the amount of land protected in reserves from 66 percent to 75
percent, pulling in most (though not all)
of the remaining mature and old-growth
forests technically left unprotected by the
Northwest Forest Plan. The plans would
also end salvage logging of burned trees
inside reserves — a provision environmentalists have long fought for.
Still, a coalition of 22 environmental
groups has filed a formal protest, arguing
that the plans would eliminate key protec-
Logging truck driver
James Griffin tightens
the chains securing
a full load of logs
he’s taking to a mill
from a burned area
in Washington.
Environmentalists
oppose salvage logging
of burned forests
because it can damage
habitat, slow natural
recovery and increase
erosion. ALAN BERNER/
THE SEATTLE TIMES
tions. For one, they shrink stream buffers
that have significantly improved watersheds by, among other things, limiting
logging that contributes to sediment runoff. The buffers also gave streams room to
shift course, and maintained connections
between habitat patches for species like
spotted owls. Inside old-growth reserves,
the new plans would drop prohibitions
against cutting trees over 80 years old,
and allow logged openings up to four acres
— eight times the size currently allowed.
And though managers are expressly directed to maintain habitat for threatened
spotted owls and murrelets, another imperiled bird, they’re permitted to remove
or downgrade it, through fuel reduction or
other treatments, for “the overall health of
the stand or adjacent stands.” Such vague
language invites abuse, says Chandra
LeGue, western Oregon field coordinator
for Oregon Wild. “It’s more discretionary.
And if the policy says they can do it, we’re
afraid they will do it.”
In sum, though, the plans are an incremental but “clear improvement” over
the Northwest Forest Plan, says Paul
Henson, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Oregon state supervisor. The agency
favors active restoration if it ultimately
improves habitat, Henson says, and the
BLM explicitly adopted concepts from
Fish and Wildlife’s spotted owl recovery plan, which makes it easier to hold
managers accountable for protecting the
species. Plus, the BLM must consult with
Fish and Wildlife on projects that could
harm owls or murrelets — an additional
safeguard.
But environmentalists’ strong objections raise doubts about whether the
BLM can achieve its new timber targets.
The Pacific Northwest may be at a point
where logging is socially unacceptable unless it has clear ecological purposes that
outweigh economic ones, observes Norm
Johnson, a forestry professor at Oregon
State University and a Northwest Forest Plan author. In the BLM’s “moderate intensity” logging areas, companies
could cut 85 to 95 percent of trees, which
seems likely to incite controversy even in
cases where it’s ecologically defensible.
“If your harvest can be identified with
clear-cutting, you’re sunk. The public
hates clear-cutting on federal land,” Johnson says. The BLM is “really testing the
ground for changes to the Northwest Forest Plan. And if the BLM can’t do it, it says
a lot about the future of federal forestry.”
Local counties worry about harvests
for different reasons. “It’s not an attainable goal,” says Tony Hyde, a Columbia
County commissioner and chairman of the
Association of O&C Counties, which has
also protested the new plans. Chris Cadwell, a retired BLM forest analyst consulting for the counties, says a fair amount
of spotted owl and murrelet critical habitat still falls outside reserves, in harvest
lands. That may mean further restrictions
from Fish and Wildlife or environmental
lawsuits. The plan also forbids projects
that would harm spotted owls, for up to
eight years or until Fish and Wildlife begins management of barred owls, an invasive species that threatens spotted owls.
That, Cadwell warns, could cause further
logging reductions.
The timing is terrible for the counties.
Last year, Congress failed to renew Secure
Rural School payments, and direct O&C
payments will be much lower, given timber revenues’ slump. Four O&C counties
are on a state watch list for financial distress. They have some of the state’s lowest
property taxes, but have been unable to
raise rates to make up for shortfalls. Already, 17 O&C counties plan to sue. The
O&C Act, they argue, requires the BLM to
offer at least 500 million board-feet annually, with all O&C timberlands available
for “permanent forest production.”
The lawsuit and others to come may
force a court reckoning over just how much
timber harvest the 1937 law requires. “I
think the counties want to know and the
forest products industry wants to know
and the environmental community wants
to know: What does the O&C Act really mean?” says Travis Joseph, president of
the American Forest Resource Council, a
Northwest timber trade association. “Does
it mean what it says? Or has it been circumvented by other acts of Congress?”
Environmentalists feel confident in
their legal interpretation: After all, the
O&C Act mandates protecting watersheds
and recreation alongside timber production. “We read the O&C Act as Congress’s
first attempt to do a multiple-use statute,” says Kerr. The BLM, he and others
believe, has discretion to prioritize more
conservation. And if the plans stand, Kerr
says, “I’m looking forward to them trying
to cut old growth and having people sit in
trees again.”
Reed Wilson might be up for that.
Originally from Texas, he got involved in
public-lands activism through a famous
tree-sit to save 94 acres of old growth at
central Oregon’s Fall Creek. “It lasted five
years, through the winter and everything,”
he says. “It was wonderful.” Up on the platforms, flying squirrels would sometimes
land on protesters. “They’d try to take the
food out of your hand,” Wilson says. “We’d
see them launch. They’d go to the edge of
the platform and just, choooooo.”
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BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES
Conservationist? Irrigable land? Stellar
seed-saving NGO is available to serious partner. Package must include financial support.
Details: http://seeds.ojaidigital.net.
Executive Director – We are looking for an
Executive Director. Please visit missouribreaks.
org/blog for more info.
Conservation Director – Idaho Rivers
United – IRU’s Conservation Director is the
senior staff position responsible for directing our conservation program. Please visit
http://www.idahorivers.org/conservation-director for the full job description.
Executive director, Eastern Sierra
Interpretive Association — Great job with
a great organization in a great location. Info:
go to esiaonline.org, or call 760-873-2411.
Director, Southern Rockies Program
The National Forest Foundation, a national
conservation organization, seeks a Director
for its Southern Rockies Program. Position
develops projects, builds partnerships and
works with local communities, nonprofits and
Forest Service primarily in Colorado and Arizona. Understanding of Intermountain and
Southwestern natural resource issues; facilitation skills; ability to work with diverse constituents; knowledge of Forest Service systems;
master’s degree (or equivalent) in natural resource-related field and 10 years’ experience
in conservation programs and collaborative
conservation are essential. Position to be
located in Colorado or Arizona. No phone
inquiries. Excellent compensation package.
Candidates should submit résumé and cover
letter to: [email protected]
Web site: www.nationalforests.org.
Executive Director, Pacific Biodiversity
Institute — Seeking a visionary and creative
leader with a passion for informing and inspiring conservation actions through scientific
research and education. See pacificbio.org/
jobs/ED.html.
Muleshoe Ranch Preserve Steward –
The Nature Conservancy’s Arizona Chapter
is hiring a Preserve Steward for the Muleshoe
Ranch to assist in the day-to-day operations,
which will include the maintenance, management and general oversight of the preserve
Highly profitable outfitting business
and canoe livery for sale in Montana. Offering
fully guided trips as well as operating a very
busy canoe and kayak livery in a national
monument. The leading outfitter since
1965. Three-bedroom home, 40-foot-by-60foot warehouse, fleet of vans, trucks, trailers,
over 70 canoes and kayaks. Turnkey. 1-877538-4890.
EMPLOYMENT
and will assist with the guest services operation. For more information and to apply
by the July 28 deadline, go to www.nature.
org/careers and search for Job # 44431. The
Nature Conservancy is an EOE.
Field Organizer, Southwest Environmental Center – Mobilize public support
for Mexican wolves, native wildlife and public
lands. Info at wildmesquite.org.
Senior Energy Policy Advisor wanted
Western Resource Advocates is seeking an
experienced Senior Energy Policy Advisor to
join our Clean Energy Program full-time in
Nevada. For more info and how to apply:
www.westernresourceadvocates.org.
Communications Manager – The Idaho
Conservation League seeks dynamic communications professional who is passionate
about conservation. Based in our Boise office, the Communications Manager advances
ICL’s mission by using all communications
and marketing channels, tactics and tools
available. The Communications Manager
works with statewide ICL team to ensure
that communications and marketing activities
are focused, that outreach to members, the
public and opinion leaders is consistent and
effective, and that we grow our audiences. To
view the full job announcement and apply,
visit www.idahoconservation.org/about/
job-openings/.
Executive Director - Western Watersheds Project, a West-wide nonprofit conservation advocacy-organization, is seeking a
qualified and committed Executive Director.
The ED will oversee a dozen staff and contract
employees in multiple field offices; ensure
financial health of the organization; review,
commit to and be comfortable with litigation
both strategically and procedurally; be the
face of the organization in the media; and
interact with agencies and policymakers on a
range of conservation issues. Salary commensurate with experience. Information: www.
westernwatersheds.org/jobs/.
Executive Director — Grand Staircase Escalante Partners is hiring Executive Director
for Kanab, Utah, office. Seeking experienced
fundraiser and supervisor. Salary negotiable
DOE. Position Description and other info at
www.gsenm.org. Open until filled.
Communications Manager, Northwest
Region – The Wilderness Society is looking
for an experienced Communications Manager
for our Northwest Region. Boise, Idaho, is
the preferred location. Seattle, Wash., may
be considered. For more information, please
visit our website: www.wilderness.org/careers-and-internships.
Executive Director, New Mexico Wildlife Center — Wildlife rehabilitation hospital
and science education center near Santa Fe,
N.M. nmwildlifecenter.org/content.php?content=events.
MARKETPL ACE
CONFERENCES AND EVENTS
PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
WORKSHOP: HOW TO PRODUCE A
WILDLIFE VIDEO DOCUMENTARY —
Produce your own 10- to 12-minute wildlife
documentary featuring our newly proclaimed
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lectures, hands-on editing! July 31-Aug. 5,
2016. tatankaproductions.net.
Multidisciplined/experienced resource
manager — Seasoned, certified forester,
ecologist, resource manager and conservationist seeking employment opportunities
in the Western states. Recognized for leadership, ability to communicate and work with
all stakeholders. Experience and adaptability
essential to your success! Résumé upon request: 903-721-4530. billrose.rose@gmail.
com. Bill Rose.
HOME AND GARDEN
Beaver Flooding Issues? Long-term, lowmaintenance and cost-effective solutions for
beaver-caused flooding and culvert damming.
www.BeaverStateWildlifeSolutions.com.
Expert land steward – Available now for
site conservator, property manager. View
résumé at: http://skills.ojaidigital.net.
AGGRAND Natural Liquid Fertilizers
Chemical dependent? Grow responsibly,
naturally, easily with proven AGGRAND.
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Aquabot High-Pressure Water Bottles
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Nonprofit organizational development
We work with small- to medium-sized NPOs on
board structure, mission and vision, strategic
planning and fundraising. May we help you?
www.firstcreekpartners.com.
Home-office position – Looking for hardworking, self-motivated individuals. Be own
boss. Customer service. www.laecoteam.com.
Wildland Fire Services — Planning, reviews,
litigation, www.blackbull-wildfire.com.
Environmental law/science research
and writing — Experienced JD, LLM,
Ph.D. Providing general overview to
detailed analysis (but not legal advice).
Holly [email protected].
541-740-9716.
PUBLICATIONS AND BOOKS
Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of
Place by Shelley Armitage — An environmental memoir set in the Texas Panhandle,
exploring history, prehistory, and eco-issues
through personal story. “A quiet masterpiece.” —BK Loren. “Once you’ve ambled into
these ... lyrical, evocative pages ... the Plains
will never be plain again.” —Bill DeBuys.
Functional and Funded: The InsideOut Strategy for Developing Your
Nonprofit’s Resources describes potent
business as unusual and flipping typical
proposal development on its head to pursue
resources for your nonprofit organization. The
author offers a signature strategy to both
strengthen your organization internally and
convince those with assets to support your
proposed efforts. See www.fundednpo.com
for ordering options.
REAL ESTATE FOR SALE
Solar off-grid — 3,960-square-foot log-sided home for sale overlooking Idaho’s wild
and scenic Salmon River on 13.42 irrigated
acres, 40 miles downstream of Salmon, Idaho,
with 1,344-square-foot barn on horse-friendly
property and abundant wildlife viewing. Visit www.offgrididahorealestate.com. Contact
Esther: 208-756-7019.
for year-round food production, water
rights, barn, small animal production, large
garage. Includes auxiliary two-bed/one-bath
unit. MLS#717086. $419,750. Nesbitt &
Company, 970-641-2235.
For rent in Bluff, Utah — Really nice threebedroom, two-bath custom adobe on two
acres. Views, walk to the river. Long-term
lease. 970-769-6735.
Western Colorado — 25 acres, irrigation,
views! Private, adobe-style, three-bedrooms/
two-bath, Grand Mesa recreation. $560,000,
#719856, [email protected], 970856-3300.
Historic Woods Landing resort — Bar
and dancehall, cafe, store, post office, guest
house, eight new and rustic log cabins, 10 RV
sites, and 25 acres on the Big Laramie River
$1,650,000. woodslanding.com.
307-745-9638.
Orchard and vineyard — Certified
organic vineyard and orchard, Hotchkiss,
Colo. Turnkey operation includes machinery,
equipment and winery. $895,000. Shaffer
Real Estate Company 970-835-9350.
Spacious live/work studio and gallery
in Silver City, N.M. — Retail space, ideal
for art gallery, with large high-ceilinged
studio and living area in back, 2,500 square
feet. Historic brick building in heart of
Silver City arts district, recently renovated.
$1,000/month, lease. 650-302-2593.
Sustainable small acreage, great small
town — Custom solar home, four bed/twobath on 1.5 acres 10 miles from Gunnison,
Colo., near Blue Mesa Reservoir on Steuben
Creek. Fenced garden, greenhouse, solarium
Self-sufficient river-front home on the
Salmon River in the Idaho Wilderness
980-square-foot off-grid solar-powered log
home with 250 feet of Salmon River frontage.
Rare property on the “River of No Return”
with a garage/shop and well. 520-907-3967,
[email protected].
House for sale — Charming home located
in a small inholding within the Gila National
Forest. Close to Silver City, N.M., and very close
to the Continental Divide Trail. Off the grid.
575-574-2041 or [email protected].
Self-sustaining solar-powered threebedroom home on 14.9 acres in north
Idaho — Magnificent views from this solar
powered three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath
home in Bonner’s Ferry. Two parcels totaling
14.9 acres are surrounded by conservation
lands and easements. Beautiful home and
property with large irrigated and fenced
garden, fruit trees, spring-fed creeks/
small pond, 4,000 watt solar system with
a 10K propane autostart generator, three
woodstoves, wood storage, covered porch, twocar garage and bonus room. Hunting, fishing
and outdoor; recreation accessed by miles of
nearby trails, forest roads, national forest and
public; lands. Scott Bortz, Coldwell Banker,
208-255-9355, [email protected].
Beautiful home with 14 acres near
Grand Canyon — Bordering state land, offgrid solar power, 25 miles south of Grand
Canyon. 928-380-5687. [email protected].
Must sell: Mountain land, southwest
New Mexico — Remote 40-acre and 26acre tracts. $400 per acre. Easy terms.
505-350-4973.
Nature’s hideaway — Don’t limit yourself
to just five acres. This unique property adjoins
the Gila Forest with thousands of acres to
explore right out your back door! The recently
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home is gently tucked away as you enter
the property, and features a comfortable
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handsome home is a nice shop/garage, two
barns, tack room and a separate 200 square
foot studio with a three-quarter bath. All
outbuildings have electricity and water, a
generator connection at the pole and a 30
amp RV hookup with septic. 575-519-8453
[email protected]
Riverfront mountain retreat — 3.25 acres
with a home at the headwaters of the Gila
River. $170,000. [email protected].
Conservation land in Idaho — 180 acres
of rolling sage and wetland. One building
site. Full view of the Tetons. Close to Targhee.
Kent at 208-709-4470.
TOURS AND TRAVEL
Yurt — North Fork of the Gunnison River
Yurt with all the amenities, near Paonia, Colo.
www.vrbo.com/323752.
EXPERIENCE COPPER CANYON, MEXICO
10-day package from Los Mochis Airport. Four
nights hotel, five nights camping/hiking with
burro support. From $2,000 per person. www.
coppercanyontrails.org, 520-324-0209
Learning Adventures on the Colorado
Plateau — Small group, active, adult seminars
with guest experts, plus private custom trip
options for your family, tour or board group.
Canyonlands Field Institute, Moab, Utah.
www.cfimoab.org. 435-259-7750.
Rogue Wild and Scenic River Trips —
Three-four days in lodges, fishing
from drift boats or whitewater rafting.
37 years’ experience. 877-855-6270
tightlinesfishing.com
Coming to Tucson? Popular vacation
house, everything furnished. Rent by day,
week, month. Two-bedroom, one bath. Large
enclosed yards. Dog-friendly. Contact Lee at
[email protected] or 520-791-9246.
Reconnecting with the Earth — We invite
you to join our Sept. 7-11 retreat and explore
your connection with nature in one of the
most magnificent mountain settings in the
west. Go to www.sustainabledestination.
org/the-riverwind-foundation. 307-690-3316.
LIFE AT BIKE-SPEED LIZARD HEAD CYCLING GUIDES — Supported four- to 14day tours, car-free roads, live music, massage
therapy, seamless mileage options and soul
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of mountain biking. 970-728-5891. www.
lizardheadcyclingguides.com.
UNIVERSITIES AND SCHOOLS
Environmental Writing Institute (EWI)
Sept. 22-25, 2016, in Missoula, Mont.,
led by author Seth Kantner. Details/
application www.hs.umt.edu/ewi. Deadline
Aug. 1, 2016.
Become a certified public manager!
A leadership and professional development
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Leonard
Peltier remains
imprisoned after
being convicted in
connection with
the shooting deaths
of two FBI agents
in 1975. Supporters
of Peltier say he is
a political prisoner.
KARPOV/WIKIMEDIA
COMMONS
It’s long past time to free
a man unjustly imprisoned
OPINION BY
MIKE
BAUGHMAN
WEB EXTRA
To see all the current
Writers on the Range
columns, and archives,
visit hcn.org
So much time has passed that many
Americans have forgotten, if they ever
knew, what happened to an American
Indian named Leonard Peltier, who has
spent more than 40 years confined in various federal penitentiaries. This summer,
a group of his family members and friends
are traveling the country in an attempt to
salvage what remains of his life, and to remind us all that no statute of limitations
pertains to the application of justice.
Peltier’s ordeal began when two FBI
agents, Ron Williams and Jack Coler,
were shot to death on South Dakota’s
Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. No one
familiar with the details of the case
believes that Leonard committed the
murders, and Peter Matthiessen explored this miscarriage of justice in his
1983 book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.
Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart
at Wounded Knee, called Matthiessen’s
book “the first solidly documented account of the U.S. government’s renewed
assault upon American Indians that
began in the 1970s.”
The plain truth is that with two FBI
agents shot dead on an Indian reservation, the government needed a conviction. At Peltier’s trial before an all-white
jury, prosecutors used false testimony
against him, some of it obtained through
torture. One particularly repugnant
example: The FBI produced affidavits
by a woman named Mabel Poor Bear,
who said she was Peltier’s girlfriend and
claimed to have seen him shoot Williams
and Coler at close range. But Poor Bear
had never met Peltier, didn’t even know
what he looked like, and was proved to
have been nowhere near the scene of
the murders. When she tried to recant
her testimony, claiming that the FBI
had threatened to take her child away
if she didn’t sign the affidavit, the judge
refused to hear her testimony.
Amnesty International classifies
Peltier as a political prisoner. Some of his
other defenders include Nelson Mandela,
the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond
Tutu and Robert Cantuar, a former
archbishop of Canterbury. Michael Apted
produced an acclaimed documentary film
exploring the case, Incident at Oglala,
which was narrated by Robert Redford.
Despite the FBI’s fraudulent evidence and perjured testimony, Peltier
remains in federal prison. He went in as
a 31-year-old and is now 71. He’s been
transferred often, from Leavenworth,
Kansas, to Terre Haute, Indiana, to
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, to Canaan,
Pennsylvania, back to Lewisburg, and
finally to Florida. Everywhere he’s been,
inmates have jumped and beaten him,
likely with the collusion of guards. Now
he is going blind from diabetes, suffers
from kidney failure and is susceptible to
strokes. Ed Little Crow, a Lakota living
in Oregon, says that all Peltier wants
“is a chance to see his family and work
on old cars. If that dignified black man
who’s president doesn’t pardon him, he’ll
die in prison. This is his last chance.”
When Peltier was sentenced, the
applicable law stated that an inmate
with a good record should, after 30 years,
be released. His record was good, but,
instead of freedom, his parole board gave
him another 15-year sentence. His next
hearing is scheduled for 2024.
Before his second term ended, President Bill Clinton, under pressure from
Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye and billion-
aire philanthropist David Geffen, among
others, was expected to grant executive
clemency. But after several hundred FBI
agents, along with the dead agents’ family members, demonstrated outside the
White House, Clinton on his last day in
office pardoned a financier named Marc
Rich instead. Rich had been indicted for
tax evasion and illegal oil deals, including a purchase of $200 million worth of
oil from Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran while
53 Americans were being held hostage
there, and selling oil to the apartheid
regime in South Africa despite a U.N.
embargo. Geffen called Rich’s pardon “a
sign of corrupted values.”
On my last trip to South Dakota,
I visited the Pine Ridge Reservation.
In the town of Pine Ridge, I talked to
the man I’d come to see and then drove
north to Wounded Knee, where I spent
the long afternoon alone. There was a
pleasantly cool north wind and a clear
blue sky. I walked and thought. This
quiet place was where, in 1890, the U.S.
7th Cavalry surrounded an encampment
of Lakotas, and for no justifiable reason
opened fire. By some estimates, as many
as 300 Indian men, women and children
were slaughtered by the time the firing
finally stopped. To make a foul deed even
worse, at least 20 of the soldiers who
participated in this senseless massacre
were awarded the Medal of Honor.
There’s nothing anyone can ever do
about what happened at Wounded Knee.
But, though very belatedly, something
can still be done about Leonard Peltier.
I hope President Obama sets this man
free.
Mike Baughman is a writer in Ashland,
Oregon.
Writers on the Range is a syndicated service of
High Country News, providing three opinion columns each week to more than 200 media outlets
around the West. For more information, contact
Betsy Marston, [email protected], 970-527-4898.
In this season of fire, nix the campfire
OPINION BY
MARJORIE
“SLIM”
WOODRUFF
WEB EXTRA
To see all the current
Writers on the Range
columns, and archives,
visit hcn.org
In 1972, Grand Canyon National Park
outlawed campfires in the backcountry.
Backpackers like me considered this an
outrage. After all, the only people who
carried those fancy little stoves back
then were people incapable of building a
fire. I bring this up because we are living
through another explosive fire season in
the West.
Of course, popular campsites back
then looked a lot like parking lots. No
downed wood, no dead (or live) grasses,
no bushes, no bark on the trees as far up
as you could reach. When a dozen people
a night are building campfires, anything
burnable vanishes pretty quickly.
Note: Fires denude the camping area.
I had a stove. I remember setting
up my tiny SVEA, putting the pot on to
boil, and turning to organize my sleeping
place, because when cooking on a wood
fire, it takes forever for the pot to boil.
But my pot boileth over. More quickly
than I expected.
Note: Stoves are more efficient than
wood fires.
A fire is convivial, although I usually
don’t sit next to it: I spend a lot of time
skulking around to avoid smoke. Said
smoke also fills the whole camping area. I
can see and smell a campfire from a mile
away.
Note: Fires stink.
Fires are a survival tool. Everyone
who goes into the backcountry knows to
carry waxed matches, so that in an emergency, you may bask in the warmth of a
fire. I once spent the night at 10,000 feet
in midwinter and 14 feet of snow, huddled near a fire, but not basking. I would
much rather have had my down parka.
The wood kept burning up, and someone,
usually me, had to stumble around in the
snow gathering new fuel.
Note: Even survival experts admit
that the value of a survival fire is mostly
psychological.
One day, I found myself hiking in
the mountains right at tree level. It was
a lovely meadow with delicate alpine
flowers –– a verdant hanging valley. I
pictured myself dragging the weathered
wood into a ring, starting a fire, killing
the fragile plants underneath, and then,
in the morning, dealing with the debris
and blackened soil.
“No one would mind, would they,”
I asked my fellow backpackers, “if we
didn’t have a fire tonight?” No one would,
and that was the beginning of the end of
my fascination with campfires.
I became notorious for my refusal to
let my companions build an illegal fire at
the bottom of Grand Canyon. And then, to
let them build a fire anywhere. We had a
stove; we had warm clothing. Why did we
want to destroy old wood and leave an unholy mess? We didn’t, everyone decided.
There is a person in the Sierra Club
(who shall remain nameless) who is still
not speaking to me because I would not
let him build a fire on an overnight trip,
and he had not brought a stove. I volunteered the use of my stove, but no, he had
to have a fire, and I wasn’t going to build
one. He ate cold, dry food for three days.
I discovered that if one is not blinded
by a fire, there are stars. Small animals
creep about. There is a distinct lack of
stench in clothing –– well, it smells like
a sweaty human body, but not combined
with stale smoke.
Soon, I began to clean out abandoned
campfire rings, realizing that there is a
persistent belief that anything thrown
into a campfire will vanish. It doesn’t.
Cans don’t burn. Nor does glass, plastic,
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September 16-26, 2016
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leather, clothing, or leftover food. The
doused fire itself contains charcoal that
will last for thousands of years.
I have carried the remnants of countless discarded campfires out of the Grand
Canyon. This requires a frame pack, a
shovel, work gloves and several highgrade garbage bags.
It is, of course, possible to build a
leave-no-trace fire. It takes a fireproof
blanket spread on cleared ground covered with a mound of mineral soil. This
shields the soil from being sterilized. A
small fire built from wood no larger than
the size of one’s finger is allowed to burn
to ash. As soon as you leave, any pieces of
charcoal must be crushed to powder and
scattered to the winds. For light, it is far
easier to use a solar lantern, or a candle.
I spent a week car camping in Yellowstone with a friend, and we –– well, I
–– chose not to waste money purchasing
firewood. There was some grumbling, but
I rose above it.
At the end of the week, my friend
said, “I did kind of miss a fire, but when
you aren’t looking for wood and tending
the fire, and staying out of the smoke,
and cleaning up after the fire, you sure
have a lot of spare time.” Indeed.
Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff lives and works
at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
Writers on the Range is a syndicated service of
High Country News, providing three opinion columns each week to more than 200 media outlets
around the West. For more information, contact
Betsy Marston, [email protected], 970-527-4898.
A Forest Service employee monitors an abandoned fire in
the Coconino National Forest in Arizona. U.S. FOREST SERVICE
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BOOKS
ESSAY | BY TOM TAYLOR
The Land of Open
Graves: Living and
Dying on the Migrant
Trail
Jason de León
384 pages, softcover:
$29.95.
University of California
Press, 2015.
Crossing the Line: A
Marriage Across Borders
Linda Valdez
192 pages, softcover:
$22.95.
Texas Christian University
Press, 2015.
The Mexican-American border has inspired its own literary genre, unleashing
a flood of poetry, reportage, nature writing, crime fiction, novels, essays and even
coffee-table photo books. Together, words
and pictures paint a sharp portrait of a
landscape caught between delicate light
and terrifying darkness.
Two recent books bring unique perspectives to this invisible slash across
cultures, and to the dreams of the people
who yearn to be on the other side of it.
Jason de León’s The Land of Open
Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant
Trail is a disturbing book about an immense human tragedy. But somehow it’s
the pigs I can’t get out of my head — and
not just the pigs, actually, but the horrible reality of what they represent. De
León buys a pig and hires someone to kill
it. Shot in the head, the animal struggles
mightily as the author rubs its belly,
mumbling, “It’s OK. It’s OK.” The dead
pig is then dressed in underwear, jeans,
T-shirt and tennis shoes and dumped
beneath a mesquite. The researchers step
back to record, with scientific precision,
exactly what happens to it over the next
two weeks.
The pig represents the body of an
undocumented immigrant, de León
writes, part of an experiment to understand what happens to those who die
and disappear in the Sonoran Desert. He
repeats this violent process four more
times and writes a scientific paper about
it. The conclusion is stark and inevitable:
The desert eats poor people. As director
of the Undocumented Migration Project,
de León is conducting a long-term study
using the tools and methods of anthropology to understand undocumented migration between Mexico and the U.S.
A couple hundred thousand or more
migrants are apprehended each year at
the border. But some of those who cross
into the U.S. perish in the desert thanks
to “Prevention Through Deterrence,”
a strategy in which the Border Patrol
clamped down on major immigration
corridors to force would-be crossers into
parched and dangerous lands, deputizing
Nature as a tool of law enforcement and
sidestepping any responsibility for what
happens to people out there.
Between October 2010 and September
2014, the bodies of almost 3,000 dead
migrants were recovered in southern
Arizona alone. Hundreds remain unidentified. Countless others vanish entirely,
consumed and scattered by animals and
the elements. Those who succeed are frequently scarred — physically as well as
psychologically — by the experience. Most
have been subjected to rape, robbery,
and other unimaginable forms of cruelty,
violence and suffering on the journey. All
this in order to take dangerous, crappy
jobs no one in this country wants.
De León uses science to expose this
federal policy for what it is, “a killing-machine that simultaneously uses and hides
behind the viciousness of the Sonoran
Desert.” It has created a hugely profitable
“border industrial complex” where everyone involved — lobbyists, contractors, law
enforcement, private prisons, smugglers,
and vendors of “crossing supplies” —
makes money, with the notable exception
of the immigrants themselves.
A very different border tale unfolds
in Linda Valdez’s thoughtful, important
new memoir Crossing the Line: A Marriage Across Borders. She has written a
love story about immigration, and it is a
well-crafted antidote to de León’s borderinduced despair.
Valdez was an asthmatic 11-year
old middle-class German-Irish girl
from Ohio’s Rust Belt when her mother
brought her to Tucson seeking a desert cure. After a bumpy transition to
adulthood, Valdez became a newspaper
reporter. A chance trip to Mexico after a
boyfriend’s suicide resulted in a storybook romance when she met the man of
her dreams, Sixto Valdez.
They could not have come from more
different backgrounds. He grew up in a
house made of cactus ribs, mud, and corrugated tin in Sinaloa. He was kind, decent,
a rock-solid partner. But as a poor Mexican man, he couldn’t get a visa. So one day
in 1988, he simply popped through a hole
in the fence and safely reached the other
side. It was, of course, a very different border in those days than the one so painfully
documented in de León’s book.
Later, after Sixto finally received his
papers, the couple returned to Sinaloa to
visit his family. Valdez describes a luminous day at the beach:
“Right now, in the water, in the sun,
there was only this moment — and it
would remain warm and joyful years later, even in the dark of winter, even when
getting along was hard work instead of
child’s play.
“We sparkled in the water. Sea
jewels.”
The book describes Sixto’s crossing,
their marriage, their families, the challenges of dealing with immigration bureaucracy and how they created a happy
bicultural life together on both sides of
the border. Sixto eventually earned a
master’s degree and became a teacher.
Valdez, now an editorial writer for the
Arizona Republic and a Pulitzer Prize
finalist, has written a humane cross-cultural odyssey of love, family, commitment
and devotion that revels in the tenacity of
the human spirit.
These books show us two opposing
realities of the border: Where Valdez
celebrates life, de León’s work is mired in
death. He graphically bears witness that
not everyone makes it, and that even for
those who do, the fairy-tale ending all too
often is a desert mirage.
BY JON M. SHUMAKER
ILLUSTRATIONS: EMILY POOLE
Love and death on the border
The Chickadee Symphony
O
n my land in the Black Forest, north of Colorado Springs,
Colorado, the black-capped chickadees are up to something.
They don’t migrate, but the notes in their spring song have. It
may be a stretch to say that the chickadees are composing, but
over the nearly 30 years I’ve lived here, their spring song has
evolved in a way that I, as a composer, can appreciate.
Scientists have found that bird songs are affected in various
ways by altitude, region, stress and many other environmental
factors. I’m an artist, not a scientist, but I’ve yet to see data
showing specific pitch shifts resulting in a different melodic
shape. What I’ve heard on my land is exactly that.
I’ve kept a journal for many years. My first entries of the
chickadees’ song, from 1988, note three pitches reminiscent of a
blues lick that I often play on the guitar. For many years, that
was the chickadees’ only tune.
Classical composers often divided their symphonic movements into three chunks: exposition, development and recapitulation. In the exposition, they laid out a brief musical theme
or themes. Most composers, including Mozart, used only two
themes; Beethoven splintered the so-called rules by using however many themes he wanted. We might think of the blues lick
as the first theme or exposition of a Chickadee Symphony:
The tonic, or “home,” pitch for the chickadees is close to our
“F” note. The note varies only slightly here and there. But ever
so gradually, the top two notes of the lick, the B flat and the A
flat, have migrated in two distinct ways.
The first variation appeared alongside the original, almost
as if we were entering the development section of the symphony.
In this new melody, the A flat has migrated down a half step
(the distance between a white key on the piano and its adjacent
black key) to a G:
Above, vultures scavenge a pig carcass five days into a post-mortem decomposition experiment
in the Sonoran Desert. Left, a young immigrant gets first-aid treatment after getting caught on
a barbed-wire fence while running from the Border Patrol. COURTESY JASON DE LEÓN
If it were four octaves lower, the notes in the new melody
would sound like an old R&B bass line of the sort Elvis Presley’s
band used in “Burning Love.” (The chickadees would have to
work on the rhythm; they’re funky, but not that funky.)
As the years passed, Variation 2 came on the scene. In Variation 2, the top two pitches have both migrated down a half step.
This variation sounds like “Three Blind Mice,” or, to listeners of
a certain generation, the Three Stooges theme.
Variation 2, it turns out, is quite close to the Carolina chickadee song. Variation 2 came late to the party on my land, from
where I don’t know. Perhaps it’s an emergent property; when
conditions are right, the birds give out the Three Stooges theme.
At present, on my land, we seem to be firmly in the development section of our Chickadee Symphony. This is where composers have the most fun, playing all kinds of musical games with
the themes they established at the outset. Beethoven, in his
famous Fifth Symphony, enraptures us to this day with a sevenminute elaboration on a four-note theme: da, da, da, DUM. (I
don’t have to notate that one, do I?) It sounds a bit like a birdcall, which makes sense, since both the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies recall the sounds that the increasingly deaf composer once
heard in nature.
The development section of the Chickadee Symphony really gets cooking with a seemingly random amalgam of the
three melodies, their texture and interest enhanced by false
starts and added vocal stops — not unlike what bagpipers do
to separate notes from the constant air stream. As the three
variations skitter across, around and through one another, the
birds create an almost Bach-like web of counterpoint. Quite
beautiful.
I may need a few more decades to see where this
Chickadee Symphony is headed. Will there be a recapitulation, where the birds return to just the original blues lick?
Probably not. I’ll be expecting something new, because unlike
human art, which is bounded, nature is always in a state of
becoming.
Tom Taylor is a composer, guitarist and recording artist who
also teaches jazz at Colorado College.
U.S. $5 | Canada $6
HEARD AROUND THE WEST | BY BETSY MARSTON
UTAH
Few Bureau of Land Management rangers patrol
the vast Bears Ears region of Utah, so it hasn’t
been hard for grave robbers to loot Native
American artifacts, or for vandals to carve their
names on sandstone petroglyphs. But Utah Republican Rep. Mike Noel is a staunch opponent
of any federal management of public lands, and
he holds humanity blameless. The real culprit,
he said recently, is the small but fearless badger:
“All we can see today are badger holes,” he told
the Salt Lake Tribune. “We have to get a handle
on these badgers because those little suckers are
going down and digging up artifacts and sticking them in their holes.” The nonprofit Center
for Western Priorities expressed no little amazement at this notion of badger prowess, observing
that Rep. Noel seems to believe that badgers
can “operate a rock saw to steal petroglyphs,
spell and carve ‘F**k You BLM’ into rocks, and
shoot firearms into petroglyphs.” You’d think
that, with talent like that, one of these days an
ambitious badger might even run for the state
Legislature.
COLORADO
“She was able to pry the cat’s jaws open,” said
a deputy sheriff in western Colorado. “She’s a
hero.” He was talking about the fierce mother
who went head-to-head with a mountain lion
–– and won. The mom, whose name has not
been released, heard her 5-year-old screaming
in the backyard of their home in Woody Creek,
near Aspen. Running outside, she saw that the
lion had her son’s head gripped in its jaws. She
yanked one of its paws down and then went for
its jaw, forcing it to open wide enough for her
child to escape. After the lion fled, reports CBS
Denver, both mother and son were treated in a
hospital for cuts and bruises.
OREGON
Let’s give a whoop and a holler to honor Oregon
rancher Robert Borba, who pulled his horse out
of its trailer, leaped into the saddle, and brought
down an escaping bike thief with a lasso to
the ankle. “I seen this fella trying to get up to
speed on a bicycle,” Borba told the Medford
High
Country
News
For people who care about the West.
High Country News covers the important issues and
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magazine, a weekly column service, books and a website,
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[email protected], or call 970-527-4898.
cookies. The extreme heat also brought tragedy:
Three hikers and a mountain biker died when
temperatures rose above 120 degrees.
ARIZONA We thought they were called “dirt
bikes.” GREG WOODALL
Mail-Tribune. “I wasn’t going to catch him on
foot. I just don’t run very fast.” Borba, who uses
a rope every day to make a living, said of his
lasso: “If it catches cattle pretty good, it catches
a bandit pretty good.” As Borba slowly dragged
22-year-old Victorino Arellano-Sanchez across
the parking lot, Arellano-Sanchez must have
felt like he’d landed a part in a Hollywood horse
opera. Looking up from the pavement, he asked
the mounted cowboy, “Do you have a badge to
do this?” David Stepp, who watched the action
from his car, couldn’t stop laughing: “I’ve seen it
all, but I’ve never seen anything like that in my
entire life.” Adventure Journal reports that the
erstwhile bike-napper was charged with misdemeanor theft.
THE WEST
The early-summer heat wave that set records
across parts of New Mexico, Arizona and California inspired residents to attempt legendary culinary achievements, such as frying eggs on the
sidewalk, says The Week magazine. One woman
in Phoenix was more ingenious: She turned
her parked car into an oven hot enough to bake
“
COLORADO
Careless campers in southern Colorado have been
forgetting something important: They start campfires without any trouble but neglect to put them
out. Forest rangers found 30 unattended or abandoned campfires during just one weekend, which
doesn’t bode well for the hot dry weeks coming
up. Over the last decade, “careless human acts”
of that sort have caused nearly half the costly, destructive fires that have ravaged national forests
and grasslands, says the Pueblo Interagency Dispatch Center, including one started in early July
near Nederland, Colorado. Putting out campfires
isn’t that hard; you just need water, a shovel and
a little patience. Or better yet, maybe don’t start
one at all. (See page 24.)
CALIFORNIA
There’s an intersection in the town of Hayward,
in Northern California, that’s been reverently
watched by geologists for almost five decades,
says the Los Angeles Times. Over time, the curb
at the corner of Rose and Prospect had slid dramatically askew, with the eastern half wrenched
a foot north, and the other side pulled south,
thanks to clashing plates belowground. The
Hayward fault, which runs beneath Hayward,
Berkeley, Oakland and Fremont, is a “tectonic
time bomb,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and geologists said the town’s “faulty curb”
served as a vivid indication that an earthquake
was ready to blow at any time. Yet town officials
had no idea that the curb was famous — geologically speaking. “We weren’t aware of it,” said
Kelly McAdoo, assistant city manager. So not
long ago, the town replaced the unsightly curb
with a wheelchair-accessible ramp. But what
can you say? It wasn’t really their fault.
WEB EXTRA For more from Heard around the West, see
hcn.org.
Tips and photos of Western oddities are appreciated and
often shared in this column. Write [email protected] or tag
photos #heardaroundthewest on Instagram.
Our efforts to prepare for climate change are even
”
weaker than our efforts to prevent it.
Pepper Trail, in his essay, “There’s no Brexit from our climate problems,”
from Writers on the Range, hcn.org/wotr

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